As the Industrial Revolution was at a full swing America would start to see the
rise of “Captains of Industry”, men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. While most Americans were toiling away in the factories in the midst of unsanitary conditions and for horrendous salaries Rockefeller was making a fortune. After founding the Standard Oil Company he had gone on to construct perhaps the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. Besides, it was a very lucrative enterprise as well. The mining of oil was becoming extremely important as people needed light and later on cars would need a cheap source of fuel with which it could run. Life was good for John D. Rockefeller, and Rockefeller was not the only one making fortunes. Carnegie had created a monopoly himself, but he did it in the steel industry. While his workers were enduring terrible working conditions he was literally amassing hundreds of millions of dollars, which for the time was an exorbitant sum of money. However, as we might have guessed there was one group that was not doing so well, and that was the working class. They resented the fact that that certain entrepreneurs would make millions of dollar while they were only making a couple dollars per day. Nevertheless, it was hard for them to speak up. They thought that toppling such major companies would be an almost impossible task. However, there were certain individuals that spoke up, people like Ida M. Tarbell.
Ida M. Tarbell was born in 1857 in Pennsylvania. Her father was an oil
producer and refiner. However, even since she was young her father would be severely affected as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Industry only kept steamrolling through anyone that got in their way. Many small businesses would give up and join Rockefeller. Nevertheless, there were still some that refused to give up their business, just like Tarbell’s father. The consequences that came later would be severe. Her father never truly recovered after he saw how a company that he had managed for so long was destroyed in such a short span of time by the Standard Oil Company. This experience would later influence Tarbell’s work tremendously.
Tarbell would later graduate from Allegheny College. Remarkably she would
be the only woman to graduate in her class. Two years after graduating she would pursue a career as a journalist. She would work as a journalist for a long time, but her emergence as a prominent journalist of her time would begin as she started to conduct an investigation on the formation of monopolies and trusts. Soon she would begin publishing article after article that exposed the darker side of these large institutions. She would talk about certain questionable practices that the Standard Oil Company had used in the past, including the ones they used to destroy the business of her father. By publishing these articles people would soon learn more and more about how John Rockefeller had been able to make such vast quantities of money, and they also felt as if they had the evidence they needed to demand the dismantling of the Standard Oil Company. By playing an important role in the dismantling of this monster Ida M. Tarbell would show future journalists of just how powerful they could be with their job. After the publication of her last article on the Standard Oil Company the monopoly would soon be broken into dozens of
new, smaller companies.
It is important to talk about Ida M. Tarbell because she is an example of how
powerful and beneficial journalism can be when it is used for the right purpose and in the right way. Before Tarbell began her investigation on the Standard Oil Company many laborers and many politicians had tried to prove that the oil company was indeed stained with several incidences of corruption and questionable practices. However, it wasn’t until a journalist decided to conduct a thorough research and inform others about her findings that the Standard Oil Company finally started to crack under the public pressure.
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I agree with your claim that journalists have a responsibility to expose questionable practices. I also support Tarbell's decision to investigate Standard Oil. However, does government have the power to pass and enforce trust-busting legislation? Doesn't that go against the principles of free market capitalism? Maybe it isn't a bad thing to go against these principles as long as we are conscious of doing so.
ReplyDeleteSources:
http://www.biography.com/people/ida-tarbell-9502126#profile
http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Free-market+capitalism