Ida M. Tarbell vs. John D. Rockefeller, Part 1

Ida Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists, and the biggest work of her life involved exposing exploitive and illegal business practices at Standard Oil. Part one covers her early life, which led her to that story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
been listening to the latest season of the podcast seen
on radio, and if you have not checked that out,

(00:22):
I highly recommend it. It's from the Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University and they have spent each of
the past few seasons of that show taking a deep
look at a different issue. They've been sort of exploring
the questions about how we got to where we are
in terms of things like racism and patriarchy and democracy
in the United States. The current season is called The Repair,

(00:48):
and in their words, it's about quote, the evolution of
the colonizing, extractive Western culture that has driven us into
the ecological ditch and potential solutions the Repair. So I
was catching up on this show one weekend recently and
they very briefly mentioned the work of Ida Tarbell, and
that is somebody I was already familiar with, but who

(01:09):
for whatever reason, just had not wound up on my
list of must cover topics until now. Like I was
literally standing there in my yard doing some yard work,
and I emailed myself an email that just had the
words Ida tar Bell as a subject line, so that
when I got to my desk Monday, I would look
Ida tar Bell was one of the first investigative journalists.

(01:32):
She's really viewed as one of the primary founders of
that field before the term investigative journalism had even been coined.
And then her upbringing in Pennsylvania oil country also led
her to the biggest work of her life, which involved
exposing exploitive and illegal business practices at Standard Oil. So

(01:52):
we will be telling her story in two parts. In
part one, which is today, will be covering her background
and her family story that went on to influence this work,
and then in part two we will look at the
work itself and its outcomes. Idam and Nerva Tarbell was
born on November five, eighteen fifty seven, in hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania,

(02:12):
the oldest daughter of Franklin and Esther and McCullough Tarbell.
She would eventually have three younger siblings, although her brother,
Franklin Jr. Died of scarlet fever when he was two.
Ida's parents had both trained as teachers, and her father
also worked as a carpenter and a wilder. Ida was
born in a log house that belonged to her maternal grandfather.

(02:34):
Her mother was staying with her family while Franklin went
to Iowa with the hope of establishing a farm there.
During the eighteen fifties, the federal government sold off millions
and millions of acres of purportedly public land. That, of course,
was land that the US had claimed from indigenous nations
following warfare forster removals and genocide. Fighting between the United

(02:57):
States and Indigenous nations was still on going at this point,
but the idea of cheap, readily available land was still
attracting lots of newcomers from the eastern US. This was
especially true as newly built railroads started to make it
easier to get there. The Tarbell's plans to move to
Iowa didn't work out, though, thanks to the Panic of

(03:19):
eighteen fifty seven. A range of factors fed into this
financial panic, including speculators inflating the prices of that same land.
By the time the Panic of eighteen fifty seven started,
Franklin Tarbell had gotten some land and built a house,
and he was working at a sawmill to make ends meet.
While he tried to get the farm going, but as

(03:41):
that crisis spread, banks failed and neither Franklin nor Esther
had a way to get money. Even though he could
barter for some of what he needed, it just wasn't
possible for Franklin to keep the farm going with no
access to money, so he ultimately abandoned it and he
returned home to Pennsylvania on foot. He stopped from time

(04:01):
to time along the way to teach local children so
that he could earn enough money to buy some food
and replace his worn out shoes and clothes. He got
back to Pennsylvania in eighteen fifty nine, when Ida was
about eighteen months old. At first, the Tarbell's planned to
try to return to Iowa once the crisis had passed,
and they were saving their money to make another attempt

(04:22):
at a farm. But then something else happened in eighteen
fifty nine that changed life in their part of Pennsylvania
and the rest of the United States dramatically. Edwin L.
Drake had come to northwestern Pennsylvania with the goal of
finding a commercially viable way to extract petroleum from the ground,
and at that point there really wasn't one people might

(04:44):
skim the oil off of bodies of water that it
had seeped into, or they might have extracted from shale
or coal tar. But all of this was really labor
intensive and it didn't really produce much oil. It was
a small enough amount that it wasn't used as a
few very often and said it was mostly used in
making medicines, and that was something indigenous peoples of the

(05:05):
region had been doing for thousands of years. For fuel,
people were burning things like whale oil and a lamp
oil made from turpentine which came from pine trees, but
these were also time and labor intensive and in limited supply.
This made the idea of a rich, untapped fuel source
under the ground, one that people could get to only

(05:27):
if they could find the right drilling method really appealing.
At the same time, it seemed far fetched enough that
Drake's drilling project was named Drake's Folly on August eighteen
fifty nine. Though Drake's Well and Titusville, Pennsylvania, struck oil,
we have talked about various gold rushes on the show,

(05:48):
and the effect here was really similar. People flocked to
northwestern Pennsylvania to try to replicate Drake's success. In addition
to the people who were trying to drill new wells,
newcomers and people already living there found various ways to
make a living from this new industry. This included Ida's father,
who's experiencing carpentry and welding made him well suited to

(06:11):
make barrels and tanks to hold this oil. Drake's well
was a lot more productive than anyone had expected, and
at first he was storing the oil in just whatever
barrels could be scrounged up, which made the barrels hard
to stack efficiently for shipping. Franklin Tarbell focused on standardizing
shapes and sizes, and he prototyped a reinforced wooden storage

(06:32):
tank that could hold hundreds of barrels worth of oil.
Soon he had a whole business devoted to making them,
and the family never returned to that idea of moving
to a farm in Iowa. Yeah, when when people first
figured out how to drill an oil well, they hadn't
figured out how to regulate how fast the oil was
coming out, so if they didn't have enough barrels to

(06:55):
put it in it, which is basically soak into the ground.
At first, when he started this business. Franklin traveled back
and forth from the Tarbell home to the oil fields,
and then in October of eighteen sixty, when Ida was
almost three, the family moved to Rouseville, where they lived
in a house that was adjacent to Franklin's shop. Their

(07:15):
home and hatch hollow had been surrounded by woods on
a farm that was full of animals that Ida considered
to be her friends, and so the disparity between that
and a house next to a tank workshop in a
boomtown was huge, and three year old Ida tried to
run away to get back to her grandmother's loghouse. She
quickly realized that she did not know the way to

(07:37):
get there, and she went back home. Throughout this time,
Ida was being raised in a deeply religious family, initially Presbyterian,
but joining a Methodist church after they moved since that
was the only church that had been built by the
time they got there. Both of Ida's parents also valued
education deeply, so even when there wasn't a local school

(07:57):
for Ida or her siblings to attend, her mother taught
them at home, and the house was always full of
books and other reading material. Ida loved to read and
to learn, and as she got older, she developed a
love of earth science thanks to what she saw in
the oil fields and what she learned from her father.
This love of science would eventually lead her to question

(08:19):
her religious faith as she tried to reconcile what she
learned about the earth with what she had been taught
about the biblical story of creation. As a child, Ida
and her family also saw the dangers of the oil
industry firsthand. On April seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, when Ida
was four, an explosion at a nearby oil well killed

(08:40):
nineteen people, including the wells owner and Tarbell family friend,
Henry R. Rouse. The fire that resulted also seriously injured
at least thirteen other people. This well had struck a
deposit of natural gas along with the oil, causing it
to gush with an enormous force, and as people had
rushed to the area to see this spectacle, astray spark

(09:04):
caused the well to ignite. That night, A man who
had been very badly burned in the explosion arrived on
a tarbelled doorstep, and I'da's mother took care of him
until he recovered. As an adult. Ida wrote in her
autobiography quote no industry of man in its early days,
has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency than

(09:26):
the production of petroleum. All about us rose Derrick's squatted
engine houses and tanks. The earth about them was streaked
and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought
up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which
the drill had made its way. If oil was found,
if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit

(09:48):
of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease
and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If
the well was dry, a rickety Derrick piles of debris,
oily holes were left for nobody ever cleaned up in
those days. We'll get into more about Ida Tarbell's life
after a quick sponsor break. The discovery of a way

(10:19):
to get the underground oil in northwestern Pennsylvania kicked off
a cycle. More available oil meant people found more uses
for oil, and that meant more demand for oil, and
that fed into the rush to drill new wells in
Pennsylvania and to look for other sources of oil elsewhere.
The cycle was spurred on by the construction of railroads

(10:41):
and by the U. S Civil War. Although the Tarbells
lived through the Civil War. To Ida, it seemed like
something pretty far off. Petroleum was really what was dominating
their lives. In the late eighteen sixties, the oil industry
in the US went through several shifts. Oil producers started
moving from wooden tanks to metal, making Franklin Tarbell's once

(11:04):
successful business obsolete, so he moved into extracting and refining
oil himself, and to that end, the family moved again,
this time to Titusville. This transition was a little tricky
for ITAs, since for the first time she started attending
a formal school. This involved just a lot more structure
and discipline than she was used to, and she tended

(11:26):
to skip class and slack off. That is, until her
teacher sat her down and basically told her that she
was too smart for that kind of nonsense. Ida took
this admonition to heart, and for the rest of her
education she became a dedicated and exceptional student. Another shift
in the oil industry was a move toward consolidation, and

(11:46):
its earliest years, independent drillers had started new wells and
refining facilities, some of which succeeded and some of which failed.
Various newly established railroads had provided one of the methods
to move the crude oil from the oil fields to
the refineries, and from the refineries to the rest of
the continent. One of the people who played a big

(12:07):
part in the consolidation of these independent ventures was John D. Rockefeller,
who started an oil refining business in Cleveland, Ohio, in
eighteen sixty three. His initial partners were Mari SP Clark
and Samuel Andrews, but in eighteen sixty five Rockefeller bought
Clark's portion of the business and brought in a new partner,

(12:28):
Henry M. Flayler. In eighteen seventy, they incorporated their business
as Standard Oil. On February seventy two, the Pennsylvania oil
industry learned that the Pennsylvania, Erie, and New York Central
Railroads would be doubling their shipping rates for oil. These
were the three primary railroads that served the area where

(12:50):
the tarbills lived and worked. The oil producers also learned
that the railroads were offering huge rebates to a coalition
that they were not a part of. That is, the
South Improvement Company, which was based in Cleveland. As Ida
Tarba later reported, in addition to South Improvement companies, rebates.
It was also being paid for each barrel of oil

(13:11):
that producers who were not part of the coalition shipped
from the fields. If you are a little fuzzy on
your geography here, Pennsylvania and Ohio are neighbors, with Cleveland, Ohio,
and northwestern Pennsylvania both lying along Lake Erie. Cleveland's proximity
to Pennsylvania oil country and its position on the lake

(13:33):
put it in a good position to become a hub
for refining the oil that was being extracted in Pennsylvania,
but the crude oil fields were far enough from the
lake that oil producers needed some other form of transport.
Crude oil could be hauled over land to the Allegheny River,
but that was far more treacherous than transporting it by rail.

(13:53):
Like if you have ever seen pictures of the height
of oil transport along the Alleghany River, the river is
just absolutely jammed with boats full of of barrels of oil,
and you just kind of look at it and go,
how is anybody even getting anywhere on this? It also
regularly froze. It was just there was a lot The

(14:15):
Pennsylvania oil industry was outraged, to the point that sometimes
this moment is referred to as the Oil War of
eighteen seventy two. Protests broke out in Titusville, with people
vandalizing and destroying train cars that belonged to the South
Improvement Company and forming Petroleum Producers Union to try to
pool their resources. They pledged to boycott the train lines

(14:37):
that were part of the coalition, and they sent committees
to the Pennsylvania Legislature and to Congress. But the independent
producers just didn't have enough power to offset the South
Improvement Company. And it turned out that the South Improvement
Company was a coalition of railroads and Cleveland area refiners
that was spearheaded by John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

(15:00):
This had been done in an effort to protect their
refining interests from the newly established refineries in Pennsylvania. When
his part in this became known, Rockefeller started receiving death threats.
Ida Tarbell was fifteen when this happened, so she saw
oil producers and refiners, many of whom her family had
known and worked with for years, either forced to sell

(15:23):
or driven out of business. Seeing this, in her words quote,
there was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege
of any sort. It was all pretty hazy, to be sure,
but it still was well at fifteen to have one
definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for
a future platform of social and economic justice if I

(15:45):
should ever awake to my need of one. So there
was a degree of irony here At this point. John D.
Rockefeller was thirty two, and although he had already become
rich and powerful through his shrewd and sometimes questionably ethical
business decisions, his early life had held far fewer privileges.
Ida didn't know this yet, but Rockefeller's father, William Rockefeller Senior,

(16:09):
had for a time made his living as a con man,
pretending to be deaf and mute so that he could
sell bogus medical cures. John D's upbringing had been pretty unstable,
not very affluent. His father had kept another woman in
the family home and had fathered children with her. William Sr.
Was also at one point accused of rape by a

(16:30):
household employee, although that had not ever gone to trial.
Like Ida Tarbell, John D. Rockefeller had a deeply religious upbringing.
Like Ida's father, he had tried to make a better
and more stable life for himself, getting a job as
a bookkeeper, working his way up, investing his money and
starting a produce business. Both John D. Rockefeller and Franklin

(16:53):
Tarbell had paid for substitutes to fight on their behalf
in the US Civil War rather than enlisting themselves. Like Franklin,
John D had seen an opportunity to make money in
the oil industry. For Franklin it was originally making storage tanks,
and for John D. It was starting a refinery. But
they diverged in that Franklin's Tarbell seemed content at finding

(17:16):
a way to earn a good living for his family,
whether it was trying to start a farm or making
oil tanks or becoming an oil producer himself. But from
very very early on, John D. Rockefeller was interested in
controlling multiple aspects of the same industry to make it
as profitable as possible and as efficient as possible. This

(17:37):
included things like cutting deals with railroads that had actually
started with Henry M. Flagler promising the Lake shore Line
that they would fill sixty carloads with oil products a
day if in exchange, the Lake shore Line lowered their
price from two dollars and forty cents to a dollar
and sixty five cents a barrel. From this very first agreement, Rockefeller, Flagler,

(18:01):
and the rest of Standard Oil faced criticisms about whether
this was a fair business practice, especially because most people
thought of the railroads as common carriers obligated to charge
all of their customers the same rates, although that was
not required by law. Rockefeller maintained that it was fair, saying, quote,
who can buy beef the cheaper the housewife for her family,

(18:23):
the steward for a clubber hotel, or the quartermaster or
commissary for an army. Who is entitled to better rebates
from a railroad those who give it for transportation five
thousand barrels a day, or those who give five hundred
barrels or fifty barrels. Then there was the fact that
these negotiations and the contract terms involved had been carried

(18:45):
out in secrets. The only reason Pennsylvania's oil producers learned
what was going on in February of eighteen seventy two
was that a junior railroad employee had been filling in
for his boss, who was away on an emergency, and
he did not know that these newly created rates were
supposed to be confidential. In the end, Pennsylvania revoked the

(19:07):
South Improvement Company's charter so for a time, shipping rates
for Pennsylvania's oil producers went back to what they had
been before, but Rockefeller and his partners at Standard Oil
kept looking for other ways to consolidate their position. Over
the course of a few months, in eighteen seventy two,
Standard Oil started buying out Cleveland's independent refineries, often paying

(19:29):
for them and Standard Oil stock. The refiners who accepted
stock rather than cash generally wound up becoming wealthy through
this sale, but this also meant that Standard Oil wound
up controlling more than of the refinery industry in Cleveland,
with the few remaining refineries just struggling to stay in business.
The few remaining holdouts and Standard Oil's critics nicknamed this

(19:53):
the Cleveland Massacre. When the US faced another financial panic
in eighteen seventy three, Rockefeller took advantage of that as well.
He bought up struggling businesses and continued to consolidate. As
railroads failed in the wake of the panic, he focused
on solidifying his contracts with the ones that survived, locking

(20:13):
in increased rebates in the process. He was quickly becoming
known as a robber baron, an industrialist who used exploitive
practices to get ahead. Ida Tarbell was acutely aware of
all of this when she graduated from high school on
June seventy five. From there, she wanted to continue her education,

(20:34):
and we'll get into that after we pause for a
sponsor break. In eighteen seventy six, Ida Tarbell enrolled at
Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. This was not her first
choice of school. She had initially hoped to go to Cornell,

(20:57):
which had started allowing women to enroll in eighteen seven two,
But then she met Lucius Bugbee, who was the president
of Alleghany College while he was visiting her parents. Alleghany
was really hoping to increase the number of women in
the student body, and it was also much closer to
her family than Cornell was. Cornell, of course, is in Ithaca,

(21:17):
New York. Although Alleghany was trying to bring more women
to the school, Ida was the only woman in the
freshman class that year. There were four other women studying
in Alleghany at the time, to juniors and two seniors.
There was not a residence hall for women, so Tarbell
stayed with various faculty until a boarding house was opened

(21:38):
up for female students. There are various speculations about Tarbell's
possible romantic relationships while she was in college and really
for the rest of her adult life, but she was very,
very discreet about this and her own writing about herself
and in letters to other people. She was always really
careful to explain her connection to any man she meant,

(22:00):
and almost as though she wanted to make it clear
that he was definitely not her boyfriend. She said of herself, quote,
I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan,
it would fetter my freedom. She did, however, tell an
amusing story about her time at Allegheny. Quote there were
several men's fraternities in the college. Most of the boys

(22:20):
belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of
the fraternity's to put their pins on acceptable town and
college girls. You were a Delta girl, or a Gamma girl,
or a five side girl. I resented this effort to
tag me. Why should I not have friends in all
the fraternity's and I had. I had accumulated four pins,

(22:41):
and then one disastrous morning went into the chapel with
the four pins on my coat. There were a few
months after that when if it had not been for
two or three non frat friends, I should have been
a social outcast. Tarbolt graduated in eight along with a
couple of other women who hadn't been part of her
freshman class. She had made it clear that the path

(23:04):
she saw for herself did not involve marriage and children,
so at first she pursued the path that was most
common for educated young women. She became a teacher at
a school in Ohio that was about a day's travel
away from her family, but Tarbell quickly decided this job
was not for her. The pay was low enough that
she had to borrow money from her parents from time

(23:24):
to time to make ends meet. She really wanted to
be independent, so she hated doing this. But a bigger
issue was the enormous course load she was expected to teach.
She was supposed to teach various sciences and branches of mathematics,
along with English, Greek, Latin, French, and German. She tried
to resign after a couple of months, but was convinced

(23:45):
to stay, and she taught at that school for two years.
As this was happening, Standard Oil was continuing to expand
its business into other facets of the oil industry. Including
taking control of pipelines. The first pipeline lines through the
area where Ida Tarbell grew up had been controversial since
they took work away from the people who had been

(24:06):
hauling oil over land or by water, but soon they
became a primary method for transporting oil. The Tide Water
Pipeline was an above ground pipeline that had been built
by Pennsylvania's independent oil producers. Rockefeller and Standard Oil had
tried to put a stop to this project, as the
oil producers had secretly gotten access to rights of way

(24:29):
to build the pipeline. Presumably to stay ahead of John D. Rockefeller,
he had tried to buy the land out from under
them and to buy out the pipeline's directors and to
file suit against it. In the end, Rockefeller and his
associates secretly bought up Tidewater stock until they took control
of the pipeline in eighteen eighty two. When Ida Tarbell

(24:50):
moved on from teaching in Ohio, it was to work
for the Chautauqua Assembly Herald in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Chattagua was
an educational movement that had been organized in New York
and Ohio in the eighteen seventies. Its founders were Methodists,
and the movement's initial focus had been on religious education,
but it expanded to include a broader education for adults

(25:12):
along with entertainment and recreation. At first, much of this
took place around Chataka Lake, New York, but other Chatakas
were established all around the United States. Some of them
met in lecture halls and others intents, but they were
all focused on things like classes, lectures, concerts, and plays.
Tarbell once again made this connection through her parents when

(25:34):
she met Methodist minister Theodore L. Flood at her parents house.
Flood was the Chautauqua Assembly Herald's editor and publisher. I
had to initially thought this was going to be a
part time and temporary job. She would spend a couple
of weeks a month in Meadville working for the paper,
and then a couple of weeks back home studying and

(25:55):
doing research with her microscope. This was something she had
really loved doing since her teens, when she had saved
up her money to buy her own microscope, so she
thought this job was gonna let her earn a little
money and give her some time to figure out what
she wanted to do next. But that's not how things
worked out. Flood essentially gave Tarbell free reign to learn

(26:17):
and make changes at the Herald. She learned the ropes
of journalism, working her way up from a researcher to
a reporter to essentially acting as managing editor. This included
refining the papers layout and handling reader correspondents signed with
Flood's name, although she quit doing this when a reader
came to the office to thank Flood for his thoughtful

(26:37):
reply to a letter and found out that that reply
had actually come from a woman. Remember our episode on
Eunice Newton Foot when we talked about Elizabeth Katie Stanton's
account of her trip to the patent office and how
many women held patents. This was still a topic of
discussion twenty years later. In eight six, The Harold printed

(26:58):
an article by Mary A. Low Dickinson that applied that
women would never be successful as inventors, citing as evidence
the fact that there were only three hundred thirty four
patents held by women. Tarbell was deeply frustrated by this,
and in eight seven she went to the U. S.
Patent Office herself. Later on, she wrote in her autobiography quote,

(27:22):
I had been disturbed for some time by what seemed
to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of
women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They
agreed with their opponents that women had shown little or
no creative power. That they argued was because man had
purposely and jealously excluded her from his field of action.

(27:44):
The argument was intended, of course, to arouse women's indignation
stir them into action. It seemed to me rather to
throw doubt on her creative capacity. She went on to say, quote,
I had seen so much of women's ingenuity on the
far and in the kitchen that I questioned the figures.
And so I went to see, feeling very important. If

(28:06):
scared at my rashness, and daring to penetrate a government
department and interview its head, I was able to put
my finger at once on over two thousand patents, enough
to convince me that man made or not. If a
woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek
a patent, she had the same chance as a man
to get one. It's the end of the quote. And

(28:29):
although this was a much smaller project and a much
tighter focus than her later work, This was an early
example of the kind of investigation and research work that
she would go on to do. Even though Tarbell was
honing new skills at the Chautauqua Assembly Herald, including participating
in the Assembly's lectures and education courses, she still wanted

(28:50):
to do more. At one point, she was at church
and a Presbyterian minister admonished the congregation quote, you're dying
of respectability. That statement really shook her, and she felt
like she was becoming complacent. In eight ninety, she also
had some kind of massive falling out with Theodore L. Flood,
which she never disclosed the details of, but which seemed

(29:13):
somehow scandalous. So she decided to make a big change,
and in eight nine, Ida Tarbell moved to France with
three friends who she had convinced to go with her.
I love the fact that she just talked three other
people and subove into the best best. She got there
with a hundred and fifty dollars and the hope of

(29:35):
living near the Clooney Museum and a plan to support
herself by freelancing for American publications. She and her friends
did eventually find a very small but clean apartment in
the neighborhood where they wanted to live, and Tarbell started
studying at the slurbun, teaching Sunday school at the American Chapel,
and writing articles for American publications about French life. She

(29:58):
and her friends also improved to their French by inviting
French girls who wanted to learn English to visit them
and essentially trading their practice. Time in France, Tarbell started
researching Jean Marie Rolande de la Platier, known as Madame
Rolande or Madame Manon Philippon, and her activities during the
French Revolution. She also kept up with the news from home,

(30:20):
including Standard oils ongoing expansion, and Carnegie Steele's efforts to
break the homestead strike, which led to violence in the
summer of eighteen ninety two. Tarbell's friends eventually went back
to the United States. She knew this was going to happen,
but it meant that she had to move to a
smaller apartment, and she was still determined to make her

(30:41):
way as a writer. While researching her book on Madame
Manon Flipon, she submitted articles to magazines and newspapers in
the US, including to a syndicate owned by Irish American
publisher Samuel Sidney McClure. In eighteen ninety two, McClure sought
out Tarbell while he was in pairs to offer her
a job. He wanted her to move to New York

(31:03):
and work for him at his magazine, and at first
Tarbell refused, leaving Paris would mean leaving the primary resources
that she was using to research her book. She stayed
where she was, sending McClure articles from time to time,
including a lengthy profile of Louis pasteur In, but eventually
it became clear to her that she just wasn't going

(31:25):
to be able to make ends meet as a writer
in Paris. She had also realized, much to her disappointment,
that her biography of Madame Roland was not going to
have the themes that she had wanted to illustrate with it.
Even though Tarbell had said from a pretty young age
that she herself was going to be independent and free
and never marry, she thought that women were at their

(31:48):
core mothers and nurturers, so she had hoped that her
biography would give an example of a woman whose nurturing,
compassionate insight had been a guiding force in the French
Revolution before she was declared its enemy and taken to
the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. Instead, she'd found
a woman who was complicated and whose attitudes and actions

(32:11):
hadn't really been different from those of the men around her.
Tarbell still finished and published this book, but it became
less of a reason to stay in France. She went
back to the US, So that seems like a good
place to take a break here. We will pick up
next time with what happened after Ida Tarbell got to
New York started working for McClure's full time. Do you

(32:33):
have listener mail in the meantime? I do? Um. This
email is from Daria, and it really cracked me up.
So Daria says, hello, ladies, I listened to your latest
Unearthed episode, and I totally see what Tracy means when
she says all coin hordes start to sound the same.
I didn't used to enjoy Unearthed, but I would have
no idea what any of these items were, why they're

(32:54):
relevant or important. Now that I've listened to the majority
of the episodes in the archive, I really enjoy them,
especially the updates to past episodes. It's awesome to see
in real time. That history isn't changing, but our understanding
of it is. I thought you might enjoy hearing about
the coin horde I discovered when I worked as a waitress,
our tips would be added up at the end of
the night and we would be paid in cash from

(33:15):
the register. I would put the cash in a pocket
in my purse to take to the bank later. Other
than that pocket, my purse was total mayhem, because I
think most women are. Whenever my mom would carry it
for a short while, she would exclaim about how heavy
it was. Are you carrying a brick? She would say.
I didn't know most of what was in there, but
I was surprised because I didn't think crumpled receipts could

(33:37):
be so heavy. When I bought a new purse, I
cleaned everything out of my old one and was surprised
when it was still heavy. I shook it and heard
a clink. I searched inside and out and discovered there
were coins between the lining and the shell of the purse.
After doing some purse surgery, I had retrieved over forty
dollars in quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. None of these

(34:00):
was likely to be older than fifty years but a
fun discovery. Nonetheless, I've included pictures as well as a
picture of my new purse named Roberta that I think
hollywould appreciate. Thank you for all the research and source
checking you do. I'm sure it's a lot of work.
Thank you so much for this email. It delights me
so because many years ago, before I started working on

(34:22):
this podcast, UH, and before I started on the job
that was the precursor to this podcast, which was writing
for a website, I was a massage therapist and I
also worked for tips, and I also UH some places
I worked with like cash out our tips at the
end of the night, and other places we were just
given any cash that people left us as tips. And

(34:42):
I had a very very similar experience where having like
the money that I was being paid as tips that
I would then just use to buy whatever I needed,
I would just wind up with this huge amount of
change at the bottom of my purse. And I had
the exact same thing happened where the purse lining tour.

(35:04):
So I had this like mystery collection of coins and
a place that I couldn't immediately detect if I had
my hand down in there. UM, I do love that purse.
By the way, it's shaped like a coffin and it
has roses embroidered on it. I will tell you how
I saved myself from this problem. How did you do it?

(35:28):
I don't carry just one purse, okay, Like I have
a kajillion purses, and so anytime I'm going somewhere, I
just moved my stuff into whatever purse matches my outfit
that I love that day. And as a consequence, I
have avoided doing the Holy Moses. There's a kid living
in here like which I used to have a problem with,

(35:49):
just I would cart around so many crazy things and
it was always a fun discovery to unpack a long
carried purse. But um, yeah, now I have avoided those problems. Yeah.
I encourage everyone to develop a purse hoard instead of
a coin hord. In the in the covid era, I

(36:10):
have been carrying a purse less, especially if I'm going
somewhere like the doctor or the dentist, where I'm going
to need to put my stuff down. I've just tried
to like minimize the amount of stuff I'm gonna have
to take with me and put somewhere to varying success
sometimes that has worked out and sometimes not. I also

(36:30):
really like the progression of UM coming to enjoy the
unearthed episodes because I know they are some people's absolute
favorite episodes that we ever do, and other people are like,
I don't know, man, I don't know about these episodes.
They're not my favorites, which is fine, But one of
the reasons we do do them is to just show
how our understanding of the world is in its history
is just continually changing all the time. So thank you

(36:53):
again for this email. If you would like to send
us a note about this or any other podcasts, where
at History podcast at i heeart radio dot com. And
then we're all over social media at missed in History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
And you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart Radio app and wherever you like to listen to

(37:13):
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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