Ida Tarbell’s History of The Standard Oil Company

In 1902, Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company helped inaugurate muckraker journalism.

The work first appeared as a series of 19 magazine articles, later made into a two-volume book. It was credited with hastening the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and in 1999 the New York Times listed The History of the Standard Oil Company number five among the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism.

I’ve just found six of the original magazine articles in PDF format, which I’ve added to our Google library page. Once there, you’ll see a link to McClure’s Magazine, 1903. That’s the one.

Below, I’ll note some especially interesting sections.

It’s fascinating, even if you don’t bother to read the text. The cover, the ads, and the photos from the era are well worth checking out. (Incidentially, it is ALSO a very good read. Be careful. You might get sucked in.)

Key pages once you’re there:

NOTE: You can scroll or type in the page number you’d like to see. (See the top blue bar in the page.) You can also download the entire PDF if you’d like. (Top link on the right.)

• THE COVER of the issue that contained Tarbell’s first article — go to the very top of the document and scroll down just past the table of contents
• opening PEAR’s SOAP AD — the page right after the cover
• ART OF A TEAMSTER’S WAGON being unstuck — page 2
• CHAPTER 1 of The History of the Standard Oil Company — page 3
• CHAPTER 2, “The Rise of the Standard Oil Company” — page 115
• CHAPTER 3, “The Oil of War” — page 248
• Editorial on muckraking essays — page 334
• CHAPTER 4, “An Unholy Alliance” — page 390
• CHAPTER 5, “The Price of Trust Building” — page 493
• CHAPTER 6, “The Defeat of the Pennsylvania — page 606
• a bunch of fascinating ADS — scroll down to the bottom fifth of the document, and keep scrolling page by page

Here are screenshots of a few choice images.

 
Images courtesy of Google Books. Click on them to see a larger version.