Notable

IDA TARBELL: PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

Seaview/Putnam; 286 pages; $17.95

It was Theodore Roosevelt who gave investigative journalists the title of muckrakers, but it was Ida Tarbell who perfected the technique. Her father, a minor Pennsylvania oil driller, was nearly ruined by John D. Rockefeller. Twenty years later she settled the score with her scathing 1904 History of the Standard Oil Company, which described some of the robber baron's sharper practices and led eventually to the dismantling of his empire. But as Kathleen Brady, a TIME reporter-researcher, points out in a graceful new biography, the scourge of Big Business was not always bent on vengeance. Most of the time she was a stiff-backed, old-fashioned antisuffragist who easily alternated between exposes of the Beef Trust and fawning profiles of historical heroes (Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln) and even corporate chieftains (U.S. Steel's Elbert Gary, General Electric's Owen Young). With Tarbell-like thoroughness, Brady describes a defiantly single woman wasting her talent on hasty magazine articles and much of her life in platonic friendships with adoring male colleagues. Until her death in 1944 at 86, Tarbell suffered persistent feelings of inadequacy. "She was called to achievement in a day when women were called only to exist," Brady concludes. "Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her tragedy was never to know it." Happily for journalism, and for generations of employees and customers of the industries that she and her successors helped reform, Ida Tarbell never let her doubts get in the way of her facts.