All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

I have it from various interested sources that five million copies were ordered printed in pamphlet form by the Standard Oil Company and were distributed by Mr. Hubbard. They went to schoolteachers and journalists, preachers and “leaders” from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hardly were they received in many cases before they were sent to me with angry or approving comments. For a couple of years my birthday and Christmas offerings were sure to include copies of one or the other of these documents with the compliments of some waggish member of the McClure group.

I had hoped that the book might be received as a legitimate historical study, but to my chagrin I found myself included in a new school, that of the muckrakers. Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press’s increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses. He was afraid that they were adding to the not inconsiderable revolutionary fever abroad, driving people into socialism. Something must be done, and in a typically violent speech he accused the school of being concerned only with the “vile and debasing.” Its members were like the man in John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” who with eyes on the ground raked incessantly “the straws, the small sticks, and dust of the floor.” They were muckrakers. The conservative public joyfully seized the name.

Roosevelt had of course misread his Bunyan. The man to whom the Interpreter called the attention of the Pilgrim was raking riches which the Interpreter contemptuously called “straws” and “sticks” and “dust.” The president would have been nearer Bunyan’s meaning if he had named the rich sinners of the times who in his effort to keep his political balance he called “malefactors of great wealth”—if he had called them, “muckrakers of great wealth” and applied the word “malefactors” to the noisy and persistent writers who so disturbed him.

I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on McClure’s were concerned only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. “I don’t object to the facts,” he cried, “but you and Baker”—Baker at that time was carrying on an able series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—“but you and Baker are not practical.”

I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be stealing his thunder.

This classification of muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my resolution to have done for good and all with the subject which had brought it on me. But events were stronger than I. All the radical reforming element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced.

One of the most heated movements at the moment was the effort to persuade the public to refuse all gifts which came from fortunes into the making of which it was known illegal and unfair practices had gone. “Do not touch tainted money,” men thundered from pulpit and platform, among them so able a man as Dr. Washington Gladden. The Rockefeller fortune was singled out because about this time Mr. Rockefeller made some unusually large contributions to colleges and churches and general philanthropy. “It is done,” cried the critics, “in order to silence criticism.” Frequently some one said to me, “You have opened the Rockefeller purse.” But I knew, and said in print rather to the disgust of my friends in the movement, that there was an unfairness to Mr. Rockefeller in this outcry. It did not take public criticism to open his purse. From boyhood he had been a steady giver in proportion to his income—10 per cent went to the Lord—and through all the harrowing early years in which he was trying to establish himself as a money-maker he never neglected to give the Lord the established proportion. As his fortune grew his gifts grew larger. He not only gave but saw the money given was wisely spent; and he trained his children, particularly the son who was to administer his estate, to as wise practice in public giving as we have ever had. That is, it did not take a public outcry such as came in the early years of this century against the methods of the Standard Oil Company to force Mr. Rockefeller to share his wealth. He was already sharing it. Indeed, in the fifteen years before 1904 he had given to one or another cause some thirty-five million dollars.

If his gifts were larger at this time than they had ever been before, his money-making was greater. If they were more spectacular than ever before, it may have been because he thought it was time to call the public’s attention to what they were getting out of the Standard Oil fortune. At all events it seemed to me only fair that the point should be emphasized that it had not taken a public revolt against his methods to force him to share his profits.

I could not escape the controversies, hard as I tried. Nor could I escape events, events which were forcing me against my will to continue my observations and reports. My book was hardly published before it was apparent that the oil field which it had covered and which for so long had been supposed to be the only American oil field of importance was soon to be surpassed by those in the Southwest. The first state to force recognition of the change on the country at large was Kansas, where suddenly in the spring of 1905 there broke out an agitation as unexpected to most observers as it was interesting to those who knew their oil history. Kansas, we old-timers told ourselves, was duplicating what the Oil Creek had done in 1872. It was putting on a revolt. How had it come about?

For a number of years “wildcatters” with or without money had been prospecting for oil in the state. Only a modest production had rewarded them at first, but in 1904 oil suddenly poured forth in great quantities. On the instant Kansas went oil-mad, practically every farmer in the state dreamed of flowing wells. As soon as it was proved that Kansas was to be a large field the Standard took charge. It leased, drilled, and, most important, it threaded the state with its pipe-line system. No sooner was oil proved to be on a farmer’s land than the pipe-line people were there caring for it at market rates. But they began not only to develop and handle scientifically and efficiently, but quite as scientifically and efficiently they began to get rid of all the small fry that in the early days of small wells had been refining and marketing. They would take all the oil that Kansas could produce, they said, but on their own terms: they wanted no interference.