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
Her name was Ida Tarbell.
This one magazine writer did more to damage John D. Rockefeller than every senator, investigator, and ranting reporter combined.
To understand why, it helps to start where she did in the place where oil was first discovered in America, northern Pennsylvania.
Her father built wooden tanks for the oil fields, and in the winter of 1872, the South Improvement Company arrived.
The resulting fight turned the region inside out.
The talk of revolution thrilled her, she wrote later.
Her father, who used to sing around the house and tell her funny stories from this day, was now silent and grim when he returned home.
the oil region had been split in two the many who fought the standard oil monster and the few who quietly sold out to it franklin would point out the sellouts to his daughter on the street in those days she said i looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to standard oil than the one who had been in jail
Her route back to Standard Oil took 20 years.
First she taught school and then edited a small magazine.
Then she went to Paris and wrote for American newspapers, a rarity among women of the time.
It was there that she picked up Henry Lloyd's book on Standard Oil, Wealth Against Commonwealth, and rediscovered the company that had broken her father.
By then, she was a rising star at McClure's Magazine, one of the most read magazines in America.
Its popularity came from its meticulously researched articles tackling subjects near and dear to the public's heart.
Tarble had spent a decade learning how to excavate a paper trail, and Standard Oil, after 30-plus years of business, had left one that no one had followed to the end.
As a young woman, she had dreamed of writing the great American novel, with the Standard Oil Company as a backbone, and now she got to write something better, her version of the story.
In September 1901, she sat down with her publisher and laid out a plan for a three-part series on the company.
She privately doubted anyone would actually read such a long story of business.
Nothing like it had ever been tried, even by McClure's.
Her father warned her off.
Showing 1961–1980 of 20,679 · page 99 of 1034
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