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A daily, pocket-sized history of America's working people, brought to you by The Rick Smith Show team.
Wednesday Jan 06, 2021
On this day in labor history, the year was 1944.
That was the day that Progressive-Era journalist Ida Tarbell died.
Often referred to as a leading ‘muckraker,’ she is considered to have pioneered investigative journalism.
She is best known for her expose on “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which was serialized in McClure’smagazine starting in 1902.
The nineteen-part series detailed John D. Rockefeller’s rise to power, the oil empire he created, his business practices, secret alliances with railroads and refiners, and ruthless dealings.
Tarbell had a personal stake in unveiling Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
Her father was a small oil producer and refiner in Pennsylvania who was virtually ruined, as was much of the region, by Rockefeller’s machinations in 1872.
She noted, “Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks and investment houses, water their stock and rig the market. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price-cutting, by ruthless, never slothful, efficiency of organization and production.”
Tarbell combed through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and interviewed company executives and employees, competitors, regulators and academics.
In 1999, New York University ranked her history of Standard Oil fifth out of the top one hundred investigative journalist pieces of the century.
The expose eventually led to the break up of the Standard Oil monopoly by the Supreme Court under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1911.
Though her views on unions were more complicated, her history of Rockefeller and Standard Oil revealed to the public, to labor unions and to workers everywhere the levels tycoons will go to, to secure power and profits.
May 4 - UE Beats Back HUAC in Dayton
May 3 - First Workers Compensation Law is Passed
May 2 - Our Thing is DRUM!
May 1 - Mayday Marchers Attacked in Cleveland
April 30 - Refinery Workers Walk Off the Job
April 29 - Allis-Chalmers and the Road to Taft-Hartley
April 28 - OSHA Goes Into Effect
April 27 - Disaster in West Virginia
April 26 - National Guard Ousts Montgomery Ward CEO
April 25 - UAW Mobilizes Against Taft-Hartley
April 24 - The California Spinach Riot
April 23 - Sitting Down for Dignity at Ford
April 22 - The Red Jacket Mine Explosion
April 21 - The Hated Taylor Law Takes Effect
April 20 - Deepwater Horizon Explosion Kills 11
April 19 -The Daughters of Mother Jones
April 18 - We Have Fed You All A thousand Years
April 17 - Fatal Explosion in West, Texas
April 16 - Jacob Coxey is Born
April 15 - Telephone Girls Cripple New England Bell
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