The History of the Standard Oil Company

One line: Ida Tarbell's two-year McClure's investigative series, later collected as a book, supplies most of the inside detail behind Acquired's Standard Oil Part II — without it, episodes like the Cleveland Massacre cover-up would remain undocumented.

Overview

In September 1901 — the same month Theodore Roosevelt was inaugurated president — journalist Ida Minerva Tarbell pitched McClure's a history of Standard Oil; it ran as a 19-installment serial over nearly two years. Tarbell grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania: her father was an independent driller flattened by Standard and one of the leaders of the revolt against the South Improvement Company, and her brother William Walter Tarbell later became a senior executive at Pure Oil, the nominal competitor Standard deliberately left standing. She spent a year researching, uncovered the full mechanics of the Cleveland Massacre, documented secret Standard subsidiaries posing as independent competitors, and obtained smuggled Cleveland-office papers proving railroads were still feeding Standard intelligence on rivals' shipments.

Why it's recommended

Ben and David reach for the highest possible praise, via Daniel Yergin (author of The Prize), who calls it "maybe the single most influential book on business ever published in the United States." David follows with Chernow's verdict from Titan: "From the perspective of nearly a century later, Ida Tarbell's series remains the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil." Ben admits he "almost ordered the book" before deciding it would be "way too hard to read" — a small aside that still signals its heft. Both hosts stress that nearly everything covered in the series would be unknowable without Tarbell — the only other primary account is Rockefeller's own oral history to his authorized biographer William O. Inglis, which was never published in his lifetime.

Source

Standard Oil Part II: Monopoly, Breakup, and Legacy devotes an extended passage to the book's origin and impact: the serial tripled or quadrupled McClure's circulation, and the word "muckraker" was coined by Theodore Roosevelt to describe Tarbell and her colleagues. David reads Chernow's detailed assessment of her method: "a tour de force of reportage that dissects the trust's machinations with weathering clarity... It remains one of the great case studies of what a single journalist, armed with the facts, can do against seemingly invincible powers."