Ida Tarbell

But gradually, people become very aware of the high costs of what Standard Oil was doing, from monopolistic practices to just the immense wealth that Rockefeller commanded, which also included influence on politicians.

And you had journalists like Ida Tarbell who started to write about him and portray him in a very different way.

So by the time Congress breaks up his company and he is no longer in favor, I think you can see some of the trajectory of business leaders who don't constrain their own power, don't have a sense of what they're doing and how it affects the public broadly.

Did it hurt him eventually or lead to greater accountability for the ultra wealthy in any general way?

Someday, if he has been true, the facts will come to light and justify him.

Coming back on the train, I picked up Ida Tarbell's Life of Lincoln and read again the story of those bitter years of Civil War.

In the West was Fremont, brilliant, impetuous, conceited, the popular idol without consultation or authority from the president he issued in his own name an emancipation proclamation it was immensely popular in the north newspapers and public speakers hailed it as a stroke of statesmanship and its author as the man of vision who dared while the president weakly hesitated the country did not know the full facts lincoln did he knew that such a proclamation issued at that hour would do far greater harm than good it would not help to save the union and it might throw into the arms of the confederacy those border states which had in it their power to win the war so he modified the proclamation When his order was made public, says Miss Tarbell, a perfect storm of denunciation broke over the president.

The whole North felt outraged.

And now back to the episode.

Now, someone who I always think of when I think of Mercury in Scorpio is the investigative reporter Ida Tarbell, who was a key figure in the Gilded Age and the early 20th century.

Indeed, she kind of becomes the model of investigative reporting.

Now, Ida Tarbell was a Scorpio, and Ida Tarbell also had her Mercury in the zodiac sign of Scorpio.

So as I tell the story of Ida Tarbell, I want you to think of the themes of Scorpio as I talk about her life.

Now, Scorpio is ruled by two planets, as I said before, Mars and Pluto.

And you're going to hear some Plutonian themes at first.

Indeed, our word plutocracy, which means the moneyed class, comes from the word Pluto, because Pluto ruled over things like gold and silver and precious metals and diamonds, as well as oil, which we refer to nowadays as being black gold.

But gradually, people become very aware of the high costs of what Standard Oil was doing, from monopolistic practices to just the immense wealth that Rockefeller commanded, which also included influence on politicians.

And you had journalists like Ida Tarbell who started to write about him and portray him in a very different way.

So by the time Congress breaks up his company and he is no longer in favor, I think you can see some of the trajectory of business leaders who don't constrain their own power, don't have a sense of what they're doing and how it affects the public broadly.

Did it hurt him eventually or lead to greater accountability for the ultra-wealthy in any general way?

Previously, Roosevelt passed a bill that punished railroad rebates, but it really wasn't enough to get the public excited, and the end of his first presidential term was coming up.

So Roosevelt detected that the public opinion of John and Standard Oil was quickly turning from a mere dislike to a passionate hatred, and that was largely thanks to a journalist called Ida Tarbell.

You see, Tarbell's father was one of the oil refiners who were bankrupted by John's ruthless business tactics a long time ago.

Her father's business partner even took his own life after their wealth was destroyed by John.

After 41 years, John's empire had finally been dealt a fatal blow and was being split up.

Now, of course, you'd think breaking up an empire of Standard Oil's scale would be a losing situation for John.

Many of his enemies, like Ida Tarbell and President Roosevelt, certainly thought this event was a cause for celebration.

But what they didn't expect was that the dissolution of Standard Oil would be the most profitable event in John's career.

Six years later, Henry D. Lloyd, in a powerful book entitled Wealth Against Commonwealth, attacked in scathing language certain trusts which had destroyed their rivals and bribed public officials.

In 1903, Ms. Ida Tarbell, an author of established reputation in the historical field, gave to the public an account of the Standard Oil Company, revealing the ruthless methods of that corporation in crushing competition.

About the same time, Lincoln Steffens exposed the sordid character of politics in several municipalities in a series of articles bearing the painful heading, The Shame of the Cities.

The critical spirit appeared in almost every form, in weekly and monthly magazines, in essays and pamphlets, in editorials and news stories, in novels like Churchill's Coniston and Sinclair's The Jungle.

Jacob Riis photographed tenement conditions in New York.

Ida Tarbell wrote about the predatory practices of Standard Oil.

Upton Sinclair investigated the meatpacking industry.

Lincoln Steffens exposed corruption in city governments.

It's very strange.

Balaji Srinivasan actually points to Ida Tarbell, uh, as one of the main-

My hero

... enemies-

... is bad.

And no, she died in, like, 1941, and he's still mad about her.

He, he has written about this quite a few times about Ida Tarbell and what she did to Standard Oil.

And-