Crusader

...Throughout her career, Tarbell remained opposed to women getting the vote...

...In this absorbing, fact-crammed book, Kathleen Brady, a reporter-researcher at Time magazine and the author of a novel, Inside Out, has created a portrait of both the crusading journalist and the woman behind the byline...

...Writing in a precise yet anecdotal style her subject would have admired, Brady is as frank about Tarbell's shortcomings as she is emphatic about her strengths...

...In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson invited Tarbell to join his Tariff Commission, the first woman so honored, but she declined...

...After a fact-finding trip to industrial Rhode Island, where Tarbell visited grimy factories and saw 4,000 infant graves, she wrote of the tariff laws, "This, then, is high protection's most perfect work—a state of half a million people turning out a product worth $187,000,000, the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable, and bent with disease, the average employers rich, self-satisfied, and as indifferent to social obligations as so many robber barons...

...Tarbell's ambitions soon eclipsed her milieu...

...President Theodore Roosevelt, uneasy over Tarbell's exposes of big business, attacked her and her colleagues at McClure's as "muckrakers," but public outcry at her findings led to a Supreme Court order to disband the huge monopoly...

...As a reporter and editor for McClure's Magazine, a popular illustrated monthly, Tarbell spent two years writing a history of the Standard Oil Company, one of the large industrial "trusts" controlled by a few robber barons...

...In 1919, when Wilson sought to enlist her as a member of the official legation to the Versailles Conference, she declined again, refusing a chance to be the first woman to represent her country on a diplomatic assignment...

...Tarbell's articles, published between 1902 and 1904, exposed founder John D. Rockefeller's crooked business dealings, detailing how Standard Oil's elaborate spy system was used to control the railroads, refineries, and distributors, and to squeeze out their competitors...

...Her examinations of big business practices, tariff laws, unfair labor conditions, and shoddy wages forced business and government to justify their positions...

...Teaching herself to speak French, she journeyed to Paris, where she reported on French culture and customs for various American papers and began a biography of Madame Philipon de Roland, one of the architects of the French Revolution...

...Though women workers deserved equal pay for their efforts, she believed, their intelligence was inferior to man's, and they could not really compete...

...And yet, as influential as Tarbell became, she failed to come to terms with her own power...

...Tarbell, who was born in 1857 and died in 1944, was not America's first crusading journalist, but she was among the first to expose the corruption widespread in American business and the business community's collusion with government...

...Absorbing herself in the research materials in the Bibliotheque National, Tarbell studied hard, determined to prove that women could do serious, well-informed work...

...Though Tarbell had become America's best-known female reporter, Brady suggests that Tarbell's interest was in the ability of journalism to influence public opinion, not in personal success...

...Government officials, rather than restricting these illegal practices, ignored them...

...Perhaps only those of us old enough to recall the vanished heyday of Ohio steel, Massachusetts textiles, and Rhode Island leather will recognize the name of Ida M. Tarbell, the turn-of-the-century investigative reporter who is the subject of Kathleen Brady's new biography...

...Brady gently explores Tarbell's conflicts, offering fascinating glimpses of a determined literary woman who continued to work well into her eighties...

...She succeeded so well that soon Scribner's and McClure's were both bidding for her services...

...in her articles, she insisted that industry's need for women workers was temporary...

...Born to a well-to-do, conventional family, Tarbell began her career as assistant^ to the editor of an educational Methodist paper, The Chataguan Assembly Herald...

...One wonders how this stalwart career woman felt when she told her readers that working women were wasting their lives, "missing out on the great adventures of natural living...

...During the early part of this century, she immersed herself in work, turning out one investigative report after another...

...shortly after she joined the staff of McClure's, she wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln which made her a national celebrity...

...Susan Mernit (Susan Mernit wrote "Tree Climbing" and is a contributing editor of The Feminist Review...

...Though Tarbell, like so many before her, repressed her sexuality and sacrificed her personal life for a career, she writhed under her self-imposed bonds...