Behind the Scenes Minis: The Tarbell Episodes

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We talked all this week about Ida Tarbell and the history of the Standard Oil company that she wrote Breakup of Standard Oil A really weird coincidence, which was not why I chose this piece. I chose it, as I said, because I was listening to se Non Radio and I emailed myself from my yard to be like, do this podcast. But literally, as I was researching and writing it, a bunch of the successor companies to Standard Oil, we're doing congressional hearings about deceiving people about whether climate change is real. And I was like, man, this is causing me to just have a lot of feelings, a lot of feelings. Uh. I had this like tandem feeling of like man's uh iditar Bell did this all this amazing work. She she led to the breakup of this company that had a lot of unfair business practices, but also people involved with it didn't really have any kind of consequences and made a whole lot more more money. And now this is happening. Yeah, no, no, repercussions there now a hundred and something years later. Yeah, that was a lot of circular brain time spent on that while working on this. Right, That's one of the things I think we've all bumped up against it where there's like the despondency of studying history and realizing that, like the hubrisk of modern man is to always think we have come farther than any previous people. Um, but humankind is still making the same mistakes over a numbers, sometimes even when you're waving a sign that outlines those mistakes very clearly, uh, and be very very frustrating. This was also an interesting episode for me to research because a lot of what she was investigating, Uh, the reason these practices were either frowned upon or illegal or both was because of what the idea of capitalism is supposed to be like in the United States, Like, there's this idea that capitalism is supposed to involve healthy competition within free markets, and it's like resting on that idea if then you go and collude with the railroads to get yourself rates that no one else can have so that you have this unfair business advantage, that's totally the wrong thing to do. But there were and still are people who were like they were just doing maybe they were making good business deals. They had the power to make good business deals, so why not. Holly is making a face that our listeners cannot see, but man, it is a grimace, you know. It's that thing where there I think two prongs to this that are inherently problematic, right. One is that there is a tendency for some folks to like trust in that, you know, good healthy competition of capitalism, on the presumption that there will be enough morality in play that no one will do things to really hurt other people, which then gets kind of accluded by that other thing you mentioned of people going, yes, but they're just making good business decisions. The problem isn't. On paper, things that are good business decisions in terms of numbers and money are often terrible decisions for fellow humans, Yes, including the entire planet at this point. Yeah, That's why I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna give another shout out to the c Non radio podcast that inspired this episode. The entire season as is not out yet as of when we are recording this, and I think there's probably an episode that that has not dropped yet that exists as of when we are recording this behind the scenes. Um, but the first four episodes are sort of a big picture historical arc of like, how did we get to this point where we are in the West's relationship to the planet that is so contrary to the relationship of so many UH indigenous peoples who are not lumped in generally as part of quote the West. And then part five starts with looking at things that are happening right now in the Earth today where we can see what's happening and we can like see the evidence of the impact that the climate is happening. So it can be tough to listen to, but also really important to listen to and also incredibly well done. The other point that I would want need to make sure to make was, Wow, Ida tar Bell is just so fascinating and complicated to me, because if you just take any one piece out of her biography, like if you look only at writing the history of a Standard oil company, she can seem like somebody who was like a dedicated anti capitalist. Totally not true if you look at just that and the fact that she was an investigative journalist and had a college degree at a time when most women could not go to college because colleges weren't admitting women. Like you can think that she was an early example of feminism when she was decidedly anti feminist and a lot of her opinions, there's so many pieces of it. If you just say this one little slice, you get a very different picture from like Ida Tarbell as a whole, which is is there's a beautiful parallelism right between that and her research in France where she was going and thinking she was establishing Madame Roland in one way, and it was like, oh, no, she's all complicated and contradictory, and I'm like, yeah, look at yourself. All of us are. That's not even a finger point. But like, no one is. No one is a simple machine, right. We all have contradictory things that we we hold in our hearts as though they are completely normal to coexist. But it is very funny when she's like, ah, this woman not what I thought. Oh, by the way I thought was going to happen, women's rights not so much. I also was just incredibly fascinated by the story of her father having to return home on foot and just stopping at small towns to be like, can I teach your kids for a little bit so I can earn enough money? Are like barter for some new shoes. It's a different world. Can you imagine if someone came to your door today, presuming you were a parent, and said, can I teach your kids for a little while, would you be like get Yeah? That Actually that came up in her story and other contexts of like living in an oil boom town in the latter half of the nineteenth century. How it was just totally common practice for people who needed money to show up on a person's store step and be like, hey, do you have any work I can do? Uh, you know, getting a little money or getting a meal or whatever. How that was just like how the world operated. And that is not how the world operates here where we're living now. I know in other places of the world that's not necessarily the case. But yeah, it was like it just this totally different way that society worked. So my last thing that I just found so delightful was the story about the fraternity pins. The weird dramas of different social structures are ceaselessly entertaining. Yeah. Well, and also that was like a slightly different nuance of wearing somebody's pin than um, Like, I'm most familiar with the idea of getting pinned you are now somebody's steady significant other, and this wasn't exactly that, but also kind of had some of that flavor. And so just wearing four different pins to chapel giant problem. Can you imagine anyway, She's so complicated, but I still really love her. So I'm glad. I'm glad. I emailed myself from my yard to we like do this podcast? Uh, if you'd like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. And since it's Friday, Happy Friday, everybody, whatever is on your plate for the weekend. We hope it goes super well. We will be back tomorrow with a classic episode from somewhere in the back catalog, and we will be back Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H