Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller
By Steve Weinberg
W. W. Norton
256 pages, $25.95

Those who have seen the new film There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel about the oil industry, will recognize the cutthroat tactics and carnage in Taking on the Trust. Steve Weinberg’s book focuses on the earlier competition in America’s first oilfields, in northwestern Pennsylvania. In the 1870s, the chief predator was a remote, reticent entrepreneur named John D. Rockefeller. Weinberg has chronicled both Rockefeller’s career and that of the reporter who eventually called him to account, Ida M. Tarbell. Their stories have been told before, but displaying the two lives in parallel provides new insights into both. Weinberg places Tarbell on the scene as Rockefeller ravages her family’s independent oil business. Not until years later, as she was approaching middle age at the turn of the twentieth century, did circumstances allow her to fight back. By then, Tarbell had become a star writer for a fresh new magazine, McClure’s, which was exposing the flourishing corruption of the age via the genre that came to be known as muckraking. Her measured recounting of Rockefeller’s depredations, The History of the Standard Oil Company, first appeared in the magazine and was later issued as two substantial volumes; it was a classic not only for what it achieved—paving the way for legal restraints on Standard Oil—but for what it remains, a paragon of impeccable American expository prose. Weinberg, a student and practitioner of investigative journalism himself, has drawn upon an immense array of resources, and offers considerable new and enlightening information about both his subjects.

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