Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It did not occur to her she was maybe part of what he was scanning for.
Nor did she know that he also searched congregations for another reason, to slip envelopes of cash to needy members after the service.
But her verdict was the one that stuck in the minds of the public.
She wrote, "...they had never played fair, and that ruined the greatness for me."
Tarbell's articles on Standard Oil were much more accurate than Lloyd's ones from earlier, better researched and documented, but they also had their misses.
One of the most famous stories in her whole series was called The Widow Backus Affair.
Miss Fred Backus was the widow of one of Rockefeller's old Sunday school friends.
She had sold her late husband's small lubricating works to Standard Oil in 1878 and then spent the rest of her life telling anyone who would listen that Rockefeller had robbed her blind.
And Tarble told this story as gospel.
But the records tell it very differently.
The plant was obsolete, and she asked for as much as $200,000 for it.
Standards appraisers came in and assessed it as worth far below that.
But Rockefeller, out of personal regard for her, directed that $10,000 be added to the assessment.
She was then paid $79,000.
Then he offered her, in writing, to undo the entire sale if she wished it.
She took the money and proceeded to put it into Cleveland Real Estate, dying years later with more than $300,000.
Her own brother-in-law later wrote to Rockefeller, "'I know that you paid three times the value of the property, and I know that all that ever saved our company from ruin was the sale of its property to you.'"
Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow, writing a century later with these papers in front of him, Judge Tarbell's series, one of the great demonstrations of what a single journalist can do against seemingly invincible power.
But he also concluded that it does not stand up as an enduring piece of history.
In 1905, Tarbell published a two-part character study of Rockefeller himself.
Showing 2101–2120 of 20,679 · page 106 of 1034
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