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View allThe History of the Standard Oil Company
Tarbell
1904
The investigation that built the case against America's first great monopoly, document by document.
The History of the Standard Oil Company
Ida M. Tarbell · 1904
Serialized in McClure's Magazine starting in 1902 and published as a book in 1904, Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company is the founding text of American investigative journalism — a meticulous, document-driven account of how one company used secret railroad rebates and a legal innovation called the trust to dominate an entire industry. Tarbell grew up in the Titusville oil fields her book chronicles, among the independent producers Standard Oil's tactics displaced, and turned that grievance into evidence rather than polemic. The book helped drive the antitrust case that broke Standard Oil apart in 1911, and it remains the template for what a patient, sourced exposure of corporate power looks like.
18 chapters · 185,193 words · ~14 hr read
Contents
Volume One
The oil industry's chaotic birth in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and the secret South Improvement Company scheme that let Standard Oil seize control of it.
Volume Two
Standard Oil consolidates its trust, crushes the remaining independents, and faces the political and legal reckoning that follows.