This is, as stated, the first full-length biography of muckraking
journalist/author Ida Tarbell (1857-1944). Given her contemporary
renown, on a par with Jane Addams' and Lincoln Steffens', and the
lasting importance of her History of Standard Oil, that's an odd
oversight - explainable partly perhaps by Tarbell's having written
her autobiography (All in the Day's Work, 1939), but also perhaps
by her having been an anti-feminist. That's what piques Brady: this
is a poor book - stilted and trite as a life-story, a near-blank on
journalistic history, sub-textbook on the Progressive movement -
made even worse by constant nattering about what-kind-of-woman
Tarbell was. She evidently had no sexual relationships of any kind.
To Brady, "she doubtless had the curiosity and apprehensions of any
eligible girl," she had many prospective suitors (each described),
she probably had a romance going with both her dynamic boss,
publisher/editor S. S. McClure, and his steady second-in-command,
John Phillips - all of which is conjecture, seemingly directed to
claiming that, in her eventual elevation of the homemaker's role,
Tarbell was saying that "she had misspent her own life." Well,
maybe - but maybe, despite her exceptional curiosity and drive, she
was essentially conservative. That would also explain the central
dichotomy in Tarbell's life that Brady doesn't address - between
her early, severe dissection of Standard Oil and her later, broadly
pro-business writings. (It might be, too, that her pursuit of
Standard Oil did stem directly from her father's victimization by
Rockefeller, as some of her contemporaries said.) On Tarbell's
career generally - editing The Chataquan, Paris freelancing, "the
McClure's gang" and break-up, lecture tours, early and late bios
(and ghosting) - she herself is a far richer, livelier source. (For
the life and times of McClure's, there's Peter Lyon's splendid
biography of S.S.) Brady has been to the archives, spliced in some
incidental detail, added particulars on Tarbell's typically dreary
final years (dependent and unstable relatives, declining health, a
pesky hanger-on, money problems). But there's no grasp of the
subject, no zest in the presentation. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this first definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, Kathleen Brady
has written a readable and widely acclaimed book about one of
America's great journalists.
Ida Tarbell's generation called her "a muckraker" (the term was
Theodore Roosevelt's, and he didn't intend it as a compliment), but
in our time she would have been known as "an investigative
reporter," with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any
description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her
time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her
"History of the Standard Oil Company" was published, first in
"McClure's Magazine" and then as a book (1904), it shook the
Rockefeller interests, caused national outrage, and led the Supreme
Court to fragment the giant monopoly.
A journalist of extraordinary intelligence, accuracy, and courage,
she was also the author of the influential and popular books on
Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, and her hundreds of articles dealt
with public figures such as Louis Pateur and Emile Zola, and
contemporary issues such as tariff policy and labor. During her
long life, she knew Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Henry James,
Samuel McClure, Lincoln Stephens, Herbert Hoover, and many other
prominent Americans. She achieved more than almost any woman of her
generation, but she was an antisuffragist, believing that the
traditional roles of wife and mother were more important than
public life. She ultimately defended the business interests she had
once attacked.
To this day, her opposition to women's rights disturbs some
feminists. Kathleen Brady writes of her: " She did not have] the
flinty stuff of which the cutting edge of any revolution is made. .
. . Yet she was called to achievement in a day when women were
called only to exist. Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her
tragedy ws that she was never to know it."
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