Add
Private Notes
Theodore Roosevelt is famous for many things, but we tend to focus more on his foreign policy and his establishment of the natural parks. Not this series. We're going to take a look at how Teddy smashed up one of the biggest trusts America had ever seen: Standard Oil. But first, we have to lay out the groundwork. Who was John D Rockerfeller? What did Standard Oil do exactly that was so bad? And how did Ida Tarbell crack the story of a century?
Ida Tarbell's paper changed everything. Suddenly the public and the press were far more aware of businesses were becoming more and more powerful. J D Rockerfeller was not the monster Ida painted him as, but certainly, the business practices that he and folks like him (Carnegie, Morgan) were coming to light. But Teddy Roosevelt was familiar with this fight. He had been fighting it while he was in New York. And with the death of William McKinley, Roosevelt was going to take full advantage of the executive branch to start swinging.
The year is 1908. Teddy Roosevelt wins the election in a landslide, one of the biggest in American history. And as black gold flows over Kentucky all the way down to Louisiana, Standard Oil starts overreaching. Ida Tarbell goes down to help catalog the way Standard Oil circumvented anti-trust laws but this time, she has the government behind her. James Rudolph Garfield, Roosevelt's Secretary of Interior, was following Ida Tarbell's reporting and finally, there's enough to drag Standard before the courts. But will it be enough to break up these gigantic titans? Or is Teddy going to need something a little stronger?
Teddy Roosevelt figured out that the courts aren't a productive way to battle the Trusts. There's no way they can catch everyone and in order to protect the American people, it's not enough to punish the Trusts after wrongdoing. No, they're going to have to put down some proactive legislation to prevent this action before it event happens. But the conservative-leaning Senate is going to be some rough going. And matters are made even worse when the opposition finds leadership in one of Theodore Roosevelt's greatest enemies: "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman
Upton Sinclair didn't have to lie or go very deep undercover. All he had to do was carry a metal lunchbox and he blended right into the factory floor. But this wasn't any factory. This was a part of Chicago's main export, the slaughterhouse and meatpacking plants. And what he found there would shock him and all of American's when he published the results in his novel The Jungle. And the public outcry would be exactly what Teddy Roosevelt needed to help put two new regulations in check: The Pure Food & Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act.
