Ida Tarbell's Contribution To The Progressive Era

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The Progressive Era was a full of new inventions, new terms, or completely just a new time to be alive. There were plenty of different individuals made this era the amazing thing it was, one remarkable person being Ida Tarbell. She was a female journalist, who contributed much to both the journalist world and to the everyday person. Tarbell was a very determined and curious person which made her the journalist person she was. At a young age much prepared her and motivated her to move passed her challenges and become a major contribution to the
Progressive Era which is why she will go down in the Progressive Era history.
Motivation
Ida Tarbell’s father was a great motivator for her in her life and so was first hand seeing the oil company in
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On the other hand as a small child “Ida saw how boom and bust cycles swept through the dirty oil-slick communities that dotted the countryside and witnessed the horrors of accidents--fires and explosions--that plagued the industry” (Treckel, 2001). From a very young age Tarbell witness what her father and his friends constantly went through. She was exposed to the violence and danger of the oil industry very fast. The oil business and her father’s success was able to show Tarbell that she could be unstoppable.
A huge motivation for Ida Tarbell was John D. Rockefeller and his company Standard
Oil. While her father had built his company, “John D. Rockefeller formed a group of oil producers into a trust and called it the Standard Oil Company...railroads that shipped the oil from
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Tarbell's company secretly gave lower delivery rates to Standard Oil...forcing smaller companies like Tarbell's out of business” (Johnson, 2005). This caused her father to castle lose the business that took so long to create. Tarbell first hard saw how a monopoly worked and how bigger countries could easily force the smaller ones out. During a young age Tarbell saw “watched as her father and his friends crusaded against this menace to their livelihood…‘It was my