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Biography of Ida Minerva TarbellName: Ida Minerva TarbellBirth Date: November 5, 1857 Death Date: January 6, 1944 Place of Birth: Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States Nationality: American Gender: Female Occupations: journalist Ida Minerva Tarbell The crusading American journalist Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-1944) is known as the muckraker who cracked the oil trust. She was also an outstanding biographer of Abraham Lincoln.Ida Tarbell was born on Nov. 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pa., the daughter of a small oilman driven to the wall by the Rockefeller oil monopoly. Tarbell, unlike many famous people, spent an unusually well-adjusted childhood and had a healthy appreciation of her parents. She wrote of the log house in which she was born and of the pleasant memories it gave her. She felt loved and was perhaps even smug about it.In Titusville High School, Tarbell led her class and decided never to marry. She took a bachelor of arts degree at Allegheny College in 1880. In 1882 she became a staff member of the Chautauquan newspaper and eventually became its managing editor. Driven by desire for more education, she went to Paris and studied …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…the time, were expressions of hope and faith in a new kind of businessman. She supported "socialized democracy" and was opposed to left-flank movements, which she said would make people "mere cogs in a machine."Tarbell died of pneumonia in Bridgeport, Conn., on Jan. 6, 1944. The New York Times noted editorially that "her mind and personality never took age, they simply matured in richness and wisdom."On October 7, 2000, Tarbell was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Associated Works The History of Standard Oil Further Reading Tarbell's autobiography, All in the Day's Work (1939), is easily the most informative and helpful work relating to her. Harold S. Wilson, McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers (1970), has extensive biographical and background material on her life and career. See also Cornelius C. Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (1932), and David Mark Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (1964). |