a graduate of mills college I might be mistaken....check it out....^_^ only way to learn....^_^

"Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857–January 6, 1944) was a teacher, an author and journalist. She was known as one of the leading "muckrakers" of her day, work known in modern times as "investigative journalism." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell

She was one of the most influential of the American 'muck raking' journalists of the early 20th century. Ida was the daughter of one of the many independant oil men who had been ruined by John D. Rockefeller's monopolistic Standard Oil company.She was the only woman in the 1880 graduating class of Allegheny College. She began a carreer in journalism about two years later. She wrote "The History of the Standard Oil Company" a nineteen-part series, published between November 1902 and October 1904 in McClures Magazene. The articles exposed Rockefeller’s unethical tactic and portrayed the plight of independent oil workers. She acknowledged Rockefeller’s brilliance and the flawlessness of his business structure. She did not condemn capitalism itself, but "the open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists." The articles were extremly popular with readers and played a major role in the Governments breakup of Standard Oil into 'independant' companies, known as the Seven Sisters, in 1911. She became a popular lecturer and author, strangly enougfh, considering her own success, she rejected the status of role model and opposed the suffrage movement, arguing that traditional female roles had been belittled by women’s rights advocates and that women’s contributions belonged in the private sphere. I wonder what she would think of the Seven Sisters recently recombining.Exxon, once Standard of New Jersey combined with Mobil ,once Standard of New York. Stndrd of Calif and Kentucky are Chevron. Illinois, Atlantic, and Ohio are part of BP. And tho it is rarely mentioned Ms Tarbell is in the running for either the most appropriate or unfortunate names, considering her muckraking of the oil bidness. I dunno if she was sweet as apple cider.

Ida Tarbell was working for McClure's Magazine when she was assigned to write an exposé about John D. Rockefeller's company Standard Oil. It just so happened that Ida Tarbell's father had owned an oil refinery, and he'd nearly been driven out of business by Standard Oil. Ida Tarbell had grown up listening to her father complain about Standard Oil. So she spent the next two years investigating, and her friend Mark Twain put her in touch with a company insider named Henry Rogers, who gave her evidence that Standard Oil was colluding with railroad companies to drive smaller refineries out of business. After her articles were collected into the book The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), the federal government began an anti-trust prosecution, and the breakup of the company was finally decided by the Supreme Court on May 15, 1911. It was the first time that a journalist had ever brought down a major American corporation.