Taking on the trust - Steve Weinberg

Long before the rise of mega-corporations like
Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled
the oil industry with a monopolistic force
unprecedented in American business history.
Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner,
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), a fearless and
ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell
(1857-1944) confronted the company known simply
as "The Trust." Through her peerless fact
gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a
muckraking reporter at McClure's magazine,
pioneered the new practice of investigative
journalism. Her shocking discoveries about
Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening
decade of the twentieth century that culminated
in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust
decision breaking up the monopolies and forever
altering the landscape of modern American
industry. Based on extensive research in the
Tarbell and Rockefeller archives, Taking on the
Trust is a vivid and dramatic history of the
Progressive Era with powerful resonance for the
first decades of the twenty-first century.