More Than a Muckraker

Twentieth-century investigative journalism finds its roots in the work of Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944). Interested in the sciences, Tarbell brought the rigor of scientific inquiry and a penchant for accuracy to detailed investigations of larger topics, especially those involving governmental corruption and the excesses of big business. And, although Tarbell is best known for her muckraking journalistic battles with John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and the fight for antitrust legislation, she was also a thorough biographer, a social commentator and speaker, and a women's rights advocate - of sorts - during a time when most women did not work (or write) outside the home.Despite all of Tarbell's accomplishments, there has been little analysis, and no compilation, of her writings. Robert C. Kochersberger has painstakingly gathered the best of her scattered articles, book chapters, speeches, and previously unpublished pieces into a single volume so that her writings may be reexamined in the light of recent scholarship in the fields of journalism, women's and gender studies, sociology, and American history.The resulting analysis reveals Tarbell to have been much more than just a muckraker, as Teddy Roosevelt once labeled her. In fact, Kochersberger's presentation of Tarbell's fifty-year writing career holds her as an exemplary journalist whose passion, conviction, and nonfiction reporting of business and social topics demonstrate how the best journalists should use and communicate facts and impressions to the reading public