All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

I suppose I must have talked rather freely about my own recollections and impressions of its development. It had been a strong thread weaving itself into the pattern of my life from childhood on.

I had come into the world just before the discovery of oil, the land on which I was born not being over thirty miles away from that first well. The discovery had shaped my father’s life, rescuing him as it did thousands of others from the long depression which had devastated the eighteen-fifties. I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil exchanges. I remembered what had happened in the Oil Region in 1872 when the railroads and an outside group of refiners attempted to seize what many men had created. It was my first experience in revolution. On the instant the word became holy to me. It was your privilege and duty to fight injustice. I was much elated when, not so long afterwards, I fell on Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and read his defense of the right to revolt.

I had been only dimly conscious of what had happened in the decade following—the decade in which the Standard Oil Company had completed its monopoly. It was the effect on the people about me that stirred me, the hate and suspicion and fear that engulfed the community. I had been so deeply stirred by this human tragedy, as I have told, that I had made a feeble and ineffectual attempt to catch it, fix it in a novel.

The drama continued to unfold while I was abroad, came into our very household when a partner of my father’s ruined by the complex situation shot himself, leaving father with notes. To pay them it was necessary in the panic of ’93 to do what in his modest economy was unsound and humiliating—mortgage our home. While the personal tragedies came in my mother’s letters, my brother wrote me vivid accounts of what was going on in the outside oil world, of the slow action of the Interstate Commerce Commission from which all independents had hoped so much, of businesses ruined while they waited for the decision; of the Ohio suit which drove the trust to reorganization, a legal victory which in no way weakened its hold or crippled its growth. Depressing as this was, I was elated by my brother’s reports of the growing strength of a strongly integrated cooperative effort of producers, refiners, transporters, marketers, the Pure Oil Company. The only escape possible for those who would do independent business, he argued ably, was to build their own combination depending less on agitation, politics, legislation, more on sound business. Fight if necessary, but above all do business.

While I was still in Paris this clutter of recollections, impressions, indignations, perplexities, was crystallized into something like a pattern by Henry D. Lloyd’s brilliant “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” I had been hearing about the book from home, but the first copy was brought me by my English friend H. Wickham Steed, who, fresh from two years’ contact with German socialism, took the work with great seriousness. Was not this a conclusive proof that capitalism was necessarily inconsistent with fair and just economic life? Was not socialism the only way out, as Lloyd thought?

I was more simple-minded about it. As I saw it, it was not capitalism but an open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists which lay at the bottom of the story Mr. Lloyd told so dramatically.

The reading and discussions whetted my appetite; and when I came back to America in 1894, and heard anew in the family circle of what had been going on, my old desire to get the drama down seized me. Where were those notes I had made back in my Chautauquan days? Gathering dust in the tower room. I looked them up, saw that I had done well in choosing Pithole for my opening scene. Nothing so dramatic as Pithole in oil history. How many men it had made and ruined! But “the bottom had dropped out” in 1866. What was left of it now—1894? My brother and I drove over to see.

Thirty years before, Pithole had been a city of perhaps twenty thousand men and women with all the equipment for a permanent life. Now here were only stripped fields where no outline of a town remained. We spent a long day trying to place the famous wells, to fix my father’s tank shops, so profitable while Pithole lasted, to trace the foundations of the Bonta House, which had furnished the makings of our home in Titusville. The day left us with a melancholy sense of the impermanence of human undertakings; and, more to the point, it showed me that if I were to reconstruct the town with its activities and its people, picture its rise and its fall, I must go back to records, maps, reminiscences; that I must undertake a long and serious piece of investigation before I began. But, given the material, how about my ability to make it live, to create the drama which I felt? One must be an artist before he can create—that I knew. I was no artist.

Mr. McClure’s call to come on and write a life of Napoleon put an end to my hesitations; and, Napoleon done, there had been Lincoln and the Spanish-American War—no time to consider oil or even to rejoice over the final success of the integrated industry to which my brother had tied his fortune.

But here I was again faced with the old interest. The desire to do something about it, get down what I had seen, seized me. Was it possible to treat the story historically, to make a documented narrative? The more I talked, the more convinced I was that it could be done. But to tell the story so that people would read it was another matter. Mr. Phillips finally put it up to me to make an outline of what I thought possible. We couldn’t go ahead without Mr. McClure’s approval, and he was ill, in Europe with all his family.