Twitter and Ida Tarbell

[Rob Wick]

Mike,

Given that I find Twitter to be a cesspool unworthy of my time, I won't comment on the article's point. I do have to admit to some confusion about the headline, but I'm assuming that it means Tarbell and Sinclair would have been very interested in the Twitter files.

Given that Tarbell would ask "what's Twitter?" I think it is presumptuous of the headline writer to assume that she would be "all over" the files. It's like when Don Fehrenbacher was asked what Lincoln would say about busing. "The first thing he would say is, what's a bus?"

Tarbell's international fame rests on her investigation of Rockefeller, but her reasoning for doing it wasn't what one might think. Tarbell was never out to reform the world. She simply wanted to make it so other people had the right to profit as Rockefeller did by using legal means rather than extralegal ones. In fact, Tarbell often found herself on the other side of business practices question when she wrote fawning biographies of GE's chairman Owen D. Young and US Steel's chairman Elbert Gary. Tarbell did not write what she did in an attempt to change the world. She did it in order to help change a specific situation. Whether Tarbell would have found the Twitter issue worth her time is impossible to tell with any authority. However, I would doubt it.

Best
Rob