Q: What was the genesis for your look into the meetings between John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Ida Tarbell? What primary source material did you use, and were there logistical challenges?
A: In the summer of 2015, I made a ten-day research trip from Iowa City where I was on the journalism faculty at the University of Iowa. In spite of my rigorous preparation, the trip was a bust. At least, there was New York after five… I have since retired — I know that failure can be instructive, if coupled with perseverance and a clear-eyed approach. This trip failed to produce evidence to support a different topic at the Rockefeller Research Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, because there was no evidence to support that idea. At least, I can be confident of my effort. At that, the RAC is a world-class archive. Their staff were friendly and generous, but you still had to bring your own historical imagination. Or, at least, you had to know your subject well enough to know when something out of place happens. That is what happened here. On day four of scouring documents relating to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and my initial topic, I came across something wholly unexpected: A set of handwritten memorandums that Ida Tarbell had written to her personal files. They recorded her oddly personal, even unlikely, set of meetings with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He wanted her to edit a newly commissioned biography of his father, a request that defied their monumentally entangled family relationships. Also, in 2015, a series of major health issues sacked me for nearly ten years. Faced with diagnoses of kidney disease, Parkinson’s disease, and inevitably, depression, my research to a back seat. I would later learn that Tarbell also had Parkinson’s, albeit without medicine for relief. By last year (2024), I was feeling more in control of my health. So, I cracked the ream of that summer’s haul. I had left meticulous breadcrumbs, so I could see two main things: 1. That there was still no big finding about my initial RQ and 2. the “Junior” memos might work out. So, rather than reading into a very wellborn subject run search of an idea, I worked backwards to identify this obscure artifact. Prof. Dowling and I read through hundreds of pages of the half-dozen or so secondary histories to grasp the documents’ provenance and what they meant
Q: There was an interesting power dynamic at play, with Rockefeller Jr. coming to Tarbell’s apartment for the interviews, and with Tarbell forming opinions of Rockefeller Jr. What did you find interesting about this relationship?
A: Our paper shows a lot that is known about Tarbell’s view of Rockefeller’s self-serving public relations efforts. Because the memos we studied were so specific to her one-on-one meetings with John D. Rockefeller, Jr, at her apartment in NYC we were intrigued. Moreover, we could see the ambivalence with which she both loathed him for having ruined her family and admired his genuine invention of corporate capitalism. The scope and scale of her imagined involvement with “Junior”—she only even set eyes on “Senior” once—were operatic. ‘Grand, complex, and beyond compare.’
Q: How did the personal nature of Tarbell’s private notes influence her portrayals and/or your research and analysis?
A: They were the tips and signals for focusing on the intersection of this defection from their personal cold war in “Junior’s” reaching out to the one person who might endorse Senior’s soul.
Q: How do you think Tarbell’s childhood trauma involving the oil well explosion and her family’s financial hardship colored her reporting?
A: If you will read her multi-part profile of Senior in McClure’s, you can see both the monumental admiration and roiling hatred she spilled on the page for him. Maybe “admiration” is the wrong word. “Respect” sounds better. As she describes the drawing of Senior’s head, she demonizes the old man’s features so deeply. And the accompanying photo backs that duality up. Then, again, Lucifer tumbled down from heaven, didn’t he?
Q: What did you learn about the public relation’s effort surrounding Rockefeller, or the development of public relations more generally, from this research?
A: While this was not the focus of the paper, we had to account for the roles and practices of Ivy Lee and Raymond Fosdick, both PR operatives of Senior’s. I suppose that we—David Dowling handled this corner of things, among others—learned to parse the origins of and distinctions between public relations, human resources, and labor relations. I certainly learned that Edward Bernays—whom I heard speak at ICA in Montreal in 1987 and who then as ever, claimed to be the “father of public relations,” most certainly was not, no matter how many times he said so.
Interviewed by Joel Moroney