Friday Book Review: Steve Weinberg’s Taking on the Trust

It’s hard to imagine that

there was a time when Americans didn’t know what to do with oil — or that it was just 150 years ago. But when oil was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, one oil-based product was “advertised as a cure for coughs, colds, and rheumatism.” A

Pittsburgh entrepreneur sold Rock-Oil, ‘grease

that could be burned to provide light.”

Refining technologies

advanced quickly, though, and the rest his history. As writer Steve Weinberg tells it:

When the Civil War ended, thousands of soldiers made their way to the oil region, lured by rumors of lucrative employment and get-rich opportunities. War profits had made numerous oil-field entrepreneurs wealthy, and merchants such as Cleveland’s [John D.] Rockefeller had grown flush with cash. … Many of the veterans had lived elsewhere before the war but felt no desire to return to their family farms. They arrived in the unfamiliar oil region wearing tattered military uniforms, with all their possessions in a knapsack except for the rifle slung over a shoulder.

At the time, one journalist marveled

that, from his train window, “the derricks seemed like a thick metal

forest.”

Watching this great human and economic drama unfold from her hometown not far away was a young

girl named Ida M. Tarbell.

Writing for McClure‘s magazine three decades later, Tarbell would expose the unethical practices

of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company — and forever influence the way America does business.

In Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, newly released in paperback (W.W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, $17.95), Weinberg reminds us why it still matters.