Overview

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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Kathleen Brady brings to life the personality of Ida Tarbell, queen of the muckrakers, who was one of the first women to break the gender gap in American journalism. . . . [An] eminently balanced biography. --New York Times

Kathleen Brady brings to life the personality of Ida Tarbell, queen of the muckrakers, who was one of the first women to break the gender gap in American journalism. . . . [An] eminently balanced biography. --New York Times

Tarbell epitomizes the achieving women who is not a feminist. With her lithe, sympathetic, factual book, Brady helps us understand how that can be. A bitter lesson; but it keeps your eyes open; also your heart. --Susan Dworkin, Ms. magazine

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)

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