Ida M. Tarbell: "John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study"
She was one of the original Muckrakers in McClure's Magazine's January 1901 issue.
This piece is a bit later, McClure's July 1905 via the Tarbell Collection at Allegheny College.
Hat Tip that the piece was out there (from a different source): Longform.org:Author of "The History of the Standard Oil Company," "Life of Lincoln," ETC.Illustrated with PortraitsPart One."A prince should earnestly endeavor to gain the reputation of kindness, clemency, piety, justice, and fidelity to his engagements. He ought to possess all these good qualities BUT STILL RETAIN SUCH POWER OVER HIMSELF AS TO DISPLAY THEIR OPPOSITES WHENEVER IT MAY BE EXPEDIENT. . . He should make it a rule, above all things, never to utter anything which does not breathe of kindness, justice, good faith, and piety; this last quality it is most important for him to appear to possess as men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration. Every one sees your exterior, but few can discern what you have in your heart." — Machiavelli — The Prince. Chap. xviii. "John D. Rockefeller is without question the most conspicuous type of our present dominating commercial man. "The most important man in the world" a great and serious newspaper passionately devoted to democracy calls him, and unquestionably this is the popular measure of him. His importance lies not so much in the fact that he is the richest individual in the world, with the control of property which that entails; it lies in the fact that his wealth, and the power springing from it, appeal to the most universal and powerful passion in this country — the passion for money. John D. Rockefeller, measured by our national ambition, is the most successful man in the world — the man who has got the most of what men most want. How did he get it, the eager youth asks, and asking, strives to imitate him as nearly as ability and patience permit. Thus he has become an inspirer of American ideals, and his methods have been crystallized into a great national commercial code.
Nor is this all. Mr. Rockefeller distributes money in charity and in endowments. If not our first, he is certainly our second philanthropist; the amount of the money given being the standard. All over the land those who direct great educational, charitable and religious institutions are asking, "Can we not get something from him?" Receiving his bequests they become at least the tacit supporters of the thing for which he stands — that is, John D. Rockefeller exercises a powerful control over the very sources of American intellectual and religious inspiration.
Now a man who possesses this kind of influence cannot be allowed to live in the dark. The public not only has the right to know what sort of a man he is; it is the duty of the public to know. How else can the public discharge the most solemn obligation it owes to itself and to the future, to keep the springs of its higher life clean? Who then is this John D. Rockefeller? Whence did he come? By what qualities did he grow to such power? Has he proved his right to the power? Does he give to the public whence he has drawn his wealth a just return in ideas, in patriotism, in devotion to social betterment, in generous living, in inspiring personal character? Has John D. Rockefeller made good? From time immemorial men who have risen to power have had to face this question. Kings, tyrants, chieftains, since the world began have stood or have fallen as they have convinced the public that they were giving or not giving a just return for the power allowed them. The time is here when Mr. Rockefeller must face the verdict of the public by which he lives.
As to Mr. Rockefeller's origin it is typically American. He sprang from one of those migrating families which, coming to this country in the seventeenth century, has moved westward with each generation seeking a betterment of condition. He and his brothers were the first great product of a restless family searching a firm footing on new soil. The first word heard of the Rockefeller family in Richford, Tioga County, New York, where John D. Rockefeller was born, was in the early 1830's when his grandfather, Godfrey Rockefeller, moved to that community from Mud Creek, Massachusetts. There are still alive in Tioga County many men and women who remember Godfrey Rockefeller. It is not a pleasant description they give of him — a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit, but held to a certain decency by a wife of such strong intellect and determined character that she impressed herself unforgettably on the community.
Godfrey Rockefeller had not been long in Richford when he was followed by his eldest son — William A. Rockefeller — a man of twenty-three or twenty-four years of age. There seem to have been other Rockefellers, for the family was sufficiently numerous and conspicuous to cause the farm in West Hill near Richford, where they settled, to be dubbed "Rockefeller settlement" — a name it still bears.
It is with William A. Rockefeller, father of John, that we have to do here. There is enough which is authentic to be gleaned about him to form a picture of a striking character. William A. Rockefeller was a tall and powerful man with keen straightforward eyes, a man in whom strength, and fearlessness, and joy in life, unfettered by education or love of decency, ran riot. The type is familiar enough in every farming settlement, the type of the country sport, who hunts, fishes, gambles, races horses and carouses in the low and mean ways which the country alone affords. He owned a costly rifle, and was famous as a shot. He was a dare-devil with horses. He had no trade — spurned the farm. Indeed he had all the vices save one — he never drank. He was a famous trickster, too; thus, when he first reached Richford he is said to have called himself a peddler — a deaf and dumb peddler, and for some time he actually succeeded in making his acquaintances in Richford write out their remarks to him on a slate. Why he wished to deceive them no one knows. Perhaps sheer mischief, perhaps a desire to hear things which would hardly be talked before a stranger with good ears.
It was not long after he came to Richford that he began to go off on long trips — peddling trips some said. Later he became known as a quack doctor, and his absences were supposed to be spent selling a medicine he concocted himself. Irregular and wild as his life undoubtedly was, his strength and skill and daring, his frankness, his careful dress, for he paid great attention to his clothes, as well as the mystery surrounding the occupation which kept him looking so prosperous, made him a favorite with the young and reckless and, unhappily, with women. On one of his trips he met in Moravia, New York, the daughter of a prosperous farmer, Eliza Davison. It is said that the girl married him in the face of strong opposition of her family. However that may be, it is certain that about 1837, William A. Rockefeller brought Eliza Davison to the Rockefeller settlement as his wife, and here three children were born, the second of whom — the record of his birth is dated July 8, 1839 — was named John Davison.
In 1843 William A Rockefeller moved his family to a farm near Moravia, Cayuga County. The reputation he had built up in Richford as a "sporting man" was duplicated in Moravia. He soon became the leader in all that was reckless and wild in the community, and was classed by the respectable and steady-going as a dangerous character on whom no doubt much was fastened that did not belong. It may be for this reason, as well as because of his frequent long and unaccounted for absences, that he is still classed popularly in Moravia as one of the gang who operated the "underground horse railroad" — and ran off horses from various parts of the country. There is absolutely no proof of this, but the conviction and sentence to the State prison, in 1850, of three of his closest pals for horse-stealing coupled with his bad reputation made many of his disapproving neighbors fix the crime equally on him, and to-day old men in Moravia nod their heads sagely and say, "He was too smart to be caught."
There is an indictment against William A. Rockefeller for a more serious crime (rape) than horse-stealing in the records of the County, for 1849, and it is quite probable that he left Moravia under compulsion. At all events, about 1850 he again moved his family, which now consisted of his wife and five children, to Owego, New York. The family remained in Owego but three years, and then moved to Strongsville, Ohio, twelve or fifteen miles southwest of Cleveland. A year later they left Strongsville for a country settlement, about seven miles south of Cleveland, called Parma; and from there they went, in 1857, to Cleveland, moving into a comfortable brick house, which William A. Rockefeller had built for them....MORE
As I mentioned in 2016's "Izabella Kaminska on Muckrakers, Monopolists and Miscreants":
Over the years, simply because the blog is composed of things that caught my eye rather than some grand plan, we've from time to time mentioned some of the early 20th century journalists who got appended the term muck-rakers but when I did a quick search of the blog I was surprised how many we'd named, although usually just in passing.
Some links below.
Here, Ms. Kaminska writing for the paper rather than the flagship blog tips her cap to one of the most influential...
.... In 2011 we visited Ida Tarbell in "Ida M. Tarbell: 'John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study'" in part because I wanted a searchable link to the Tarbell collection at Allegheny college and partly because she described John D.'s grandfather, Godfrey as "a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit".
In February 2016's "Oil Tankers and Interest Rates and Scallywags and Time" one of the Rockefeller minions, Thomas Lawson, got a mention, not for his exposé of his copper dealings with Standard Oil honcho Henry Huttleston Rogers, Frenzied Finance, but because of the ship for which Lawson was namesake.
Staying in 2016, it was Ida's buddy Lincoln Steffens in "Goldman Sachs: Death Of Capitalism Averted, Time For Working Schlubs to Partaay!", again not for the work he was most famous for, in Steffens' case his Shame of the Cities (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh et al) but because of his famously wrong statement about Soviet Russia in a letter dated April 3, 1919: “I have seen the future and it works.”.
It didn't.
In 2015 there was Jacob Riis because I was reminded of one of the photographs from "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York":
Jacob Riis Lives! "San Francisco Housing Bubble Goes Subterranean: $500/Month To Live In A Crawlspace"
And along the way Theodore Dreiser got a major link (possibly one of the best business novels ever) in "Switzerland Begins Two-Year Trial of Driverless Buses (plus money, art, glory and sex)"
So yes, more than wary reader might have anticipated and I've probably forgotten a couple.
Circling back to Ida, here's an online version of History of the Standard Oil Company.
Although there are quite a few critiques you can raise about her book it was pretty important and was one of the factors that led to the breakup of Standard Oil in the Supreme Court decision "Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States" seven years later. So Mr Rockefeller probably considered the book important.
It ranks #5 on NYU's Journalism school's list of the 100 best works of 20th-century American journalism. (via the NYT)
