The Titusville Gusher Part 2 (Ep2)

Part one of “The Titusville Gusher” ended in about 1880 with John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company crushing the independent oil producers of Northwest Pennsylvania, where oil was first discovered in 1859 and the industry was born. In this episode, we learn how journalist Ida Tarbell’s first wrote her History of Standard Oil, which appeared in McClure’s magazine in 19 installments. She tells a detailed story of how one business came to dominate an industry, through the greedy and ethics-defying actions of those who ran it, and the counter-efforts of the oil producers and other people to stop them. Hers was the most impactful work of investigative journalism in America before the Watergate scandal.