Minerva Tarbell is recalled as the writer who blew the whistle on the first and most powerful trust in America. The History of the Standard Oil Company, her most important work, was published in 1904 and immediately convinced the public that the Standard Oil Company and its imitators in other industries threatened the underpinning of democracy--equal opportunity. The Supreme Court of the United States eventually concurred; in a 1911 decision the Court decreed the breakup of Standard Oil. Tarbell became known as the Joan of Arc of the oil regions, a historian who not only recorded history but also helped powerfully to shape it.
The pioneering drive that characterized Tarbell's career came from English and Scottish ancestors who arrived in the midst of the wilderness of seventeenth-century New England. Many of them continued to press westward in a restless search for a perfect life in a perfect place. In 1857 Ida Tarbell was born at one of these western posts, the Erie County, Pennsylvania, farm of her maternal grandparents, known only to history as the McCulloughs. Her mother, Esther Ann Tarbell, had remained with her parents while Franklin Tarbell, Ida's father, searched for new farmland in Iowa. The Panic of 1857 prevented the Tarbells' migration, and Franklin returned to the McCullough farm. News of the discovery of oil in 1859 by Edwin L. Drake near Titusville, Pennsylvania, about forty miles south of the McCullough place, sent Franklin Tarbell on a new quest and launched the Tarbell family into the oil age. The alert Tarbell went to the site of the oil strike, sized up the immense potential richness of the discovery, and decided to stay. He invented the wooden tanks first used to store the oil, prospered, and became an oil prospector and driller.
In 1860 Franklin Tarbell built a shanty near the oil fields for his family, now including Ida's brother Willie, in a settlement soon to be called Rouseville. By the time Ida was thirteen it was clear to her parents that a rowdy settlement was no place to raise children. They moved in 1870 to Titusville, a settled town with public schools suitable for their children, who, with the birth of Sarah, numbered three. A fourth child, Franklin, had died in Rouseville of scarlet fever. But the imprint of the oil frontier town on Ida Tarbell's mind went deep. She had seen her mother and father and like-minded parents build a neighborhood Methodist church in Rouseville and create a stable community around it to insulate their children from the riotous atmosphere of the boom town. She had absorbed their reliance on the family as the basic unity of that community. She had seen determined mothers impose order on a chaotic community, and she had watched fathers as they applied their frontiersmen's ingenuity to a new industry and through cooperation bring it under productive control. These experiences she never forgot, and the sex roles she had observed remained constants in her social thought, as did the beneficial effects...