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Ida Tarbell, Investigative Journalist, Takes Down John D. Rockefeller

In the 1930s, Ida Tarbell sat down at her mahogany desk in the sunny library of her Easton, Conn., farmhouse. She wrote the story of her life as an investigative journalist. She had been a teenager in Titusville, Pa., when John D. Rockefeller destroyed her father’s oil business. At 43, she avenged her father. She wrote The History of Standard Oil, which would result in the dismantling of Rockefeller’s empire seven years later.

Ida Tarbell

That wasn’t her intent, she said. She merely wanted to write an honest history of his company, Standard Oil. President Theodore Roosevelt, not always the anti-monopolist he claimed to be, called her a “muckraker.” She rejected the label.

But through steady, painstaking work, Ida Tarbell defined investigative journalism for the next century.

Ida Tarbell

She was born on her grandfather’s farm in Hatch Hollow, Pa., on Nov. 5, 1857. Her parents were Franklin S. Tarbell, a carpenter and a teacher, and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell, also a teacher.

She was only three when her family moved to the pioneer town of Rouseville, Pa., in the Oil Creek Valley. The Tarbells arrived just before great streams of oil began to gush from the ground. When those oil wells came in, her father made barrels to carry the oil to market. That worked so well he started his own production business.

Oil barrels in a flatboat in Oil Creek State Park

In 1870, when Ida was 13, the family moved to a new house in Titusville, which she called a gay, prosperous boom town in the Oil Creek Valley. Christmas introduced luxury into Ida’s life, with a gorgeous tree, a velvet cloak and a fur coat for mother.

But there was trouble brewing about 120 miles from the western Pennsylvania paradise. In Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller bought out his business partners that year and formed the Standard Oil Company.

John D. Rockefeller around 1872. He lost the sideburns.

Then Rockefeller made a secret deal with the railroads out of the city that would shatter lives in the Oil Creek Valley.

Tarbell called it “a blow between the eyes.”

The South Improvement Company

For 12 years, the Oil Creek Valley had yielded 33 million barrels of oil. An industry had grown up producing, transporting, refining, marketing, exporting and selling byproducts. The entrepreneurs of northwest Pennsylvania believed they had a splendid future, she wrote.

The first oil derrick in Titusville

The businesses were self-dependent, wrote Ida Tarbell, except for one thing: transportation. Titusville oil companies depended on the railroads to take crude oil to refineries and to take crude and refined oil to the seaboard.

But there was too much oil and too many railroads, and price competition had grown intense among both. So Rockefeller tried to create a cartel to put his competitors out of business. Thus was born the South Improvement Company. The scheme included Standard Oil, several other large oil refiners, the Pennsylvania, the Erie and the New York Central railroads. The railroads agreed to double their shipping rates. But the South Improvement Company cartel would then get a rebate as well as a kickback on competitors’ shipments.

All this happened in secret.

Wrong

News leaked about the South Improvement Company scheme in Oil Creek Valley. Ida Tarbell, 14 at the time, witnessed the backlash among the local oil refiners and producers. “As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a wonderful row followed,” she wrote. She recalled nightly antimonopoly meetings, violent speeches, processions, vandalism and appeals to state and federal lawmakers to crack down on the cartel. The uproar got a name: the Oil War.

Standard Oil refinery in Cleveland, 1897

Two Brooklyn, N.Y., refiners, Henry Rogers and Charles Pratt, led the opposition to the scheme. Rogers, a Mayflower descendant from Fairhaven, Mass., would later play an important role in Ida’s life.

The independents who fought Rockefeller formed the Petroleum Producers’ Union, and in 1872 they published a book, A History of the Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company. Rockefeller ordered all copies hunted down and destroyed. Decades later, Ida Tarbell found one copy on the shelves of the New York Public Library.

During the Oil War, she had grown convinced that Rockefeller was wrong. The railroads ran through the Oil Creek Valley because the people had given them a right of way.

“One man had the same right as another, but the railroads had given to one something they would not give to another,” she wrote. “It was wrong.”

Cleveland Massacre

On April 2, 1872, the State of Pennsylvania revoked the South Improvement Company’s charter. But it didn’t matter. John D. Rockefeller had moved onto a predatory new scheme called the Cleveland Massacre. In six weeks in February and March, he bought up 22 of his 26 competitors in hostile takeovers. Henry Rogers and Charles Pratt eventually realized the futility of fighting Rockefeller, and secretly sold out to him in 1874.

Henry Rogers about 1900

Franklin Tarbell wouldn’t sell. “I remember a night when my father came home with a grim look on his face and told how he with scores of other producers had signed a pledge not to sell to the Cleveland ogre that alone had profited from the scheme,” wrote Ida.

Because of his refusal to sell, he had to mortgage his house to pay off his company’s debts. His business partner killed himself. From then on he struggled to make a living.

“He came home silent and stern,” Ida wrote. “He no longer told of the funny things he had seen and heard during the day.”

Lessons Learned

Rockefeller then marched out of Cleveland and did the same thing with the railroads in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and beyond, wrote his biographer, Ron Chernow. He had “figured out every conceivable way to restrain trade, rig markets and suppress competition,” he wrote. He left hundreds, if not thousands, of Franklin Tarbells in his wake.

At 18, Ida Tarbell went to Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., the only woman to matriculate. She graduated in 1880 after four years. Then she taught in Ohio for two years, but didn’t take to it. So she got a job on a teaching magazine called the Chatauquan, moving up to managing editor. Then in 1890, she moved to Paris. Somewhere along the way she forswore marriage.

In Paris she met Samuel McClure, a publisher who persuaded her to come work for his new magazine, McClure’s. She wrote serialized biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln, so popular it got her a book deal.

In 1900, McClure assigned her a three-part, 25,000-word series about Standard Oil. Her family warned her against doing it, fearing for her safety. She replied she was writing a legitimate history. It would reveal “the processes by which a particular industry passes from the control of the many to that of the few.”

Investigating Standard Oil

It began,

ONE of the busiest corners of the globe at the opening of the year 1872 was a strip of Northwestern Pennsylvania, not over fifty miles long, known the world over as the Oil Regions.

And it created a sensation. McClure’s ultimately ran it as a 19-part series from late 1902 to late 1904 as The History of the Standard Oil Co.

Tarbell had plenty of material to work with. State legislatures and Congress had held many hearings and written reports about Standard Oil’s depredations. They just hadn’t done anything about it.

She searched out and pored over massive amounts of testimony, reports and books. Through dogged work, along with some luck, she found the smoking guns.

Rockefeller had organized a secret service to spy on independent oil dealers. When a Standard Oil spy learned that a business had ordered oil from an independent refiner or producer, the spy would try to persuade the customer to cancel the order. If that didn’t work, the spy would threaten the independent with cutthroat competition — selling oil at cost or less until the rival gives up. Standard Oil would often set up bogus companies to crush the independent.

People who bought oil from independent producers would be told the train cars were sidetracked. They would then be pressured to cancel the order.

Tarbell interviewed people who supported her evidence of Standard Oil’s corrupt and unethical practices. She also met frequently with her father’s old ally in the Oil Wars, Henry Rogers.

Henry Rogers

Tarbell’s friend Mark Twain had connected her with Rogers, then the acting head of Standard Oil.

Mark Twain and Henry Rogers, 1908

She liked him, and he was surprisingly willing to talk to her. He may have thought she was writing a puff piece.

We discovered in talking over the early days of the industry that at the very moment I was beginning to run the hills above Rouseville he was running a small refinery on the Creek and living on a hillside just below ours, separated only by a narrow ravine along each side of which ran a path. “Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I used to carry our washing every Monday morning, go for it every Saturday night. Probably I’ve seen you hunting flowers on your side of the ravine. How beautiful it was! I was never happier.

But Rogers lied to her. He told her the company had never illegally spied on competitors. But she had proof that wasn’t true.

A boy about 16 who worked for Standard Oil had the job of burning large amounts of company records. For months he ignored their content. Then one night he noticed in the records the name of a friend who was an independent refiner and a Sunday school teacher. So he started to pay attention – and to realize Standard Oil had been spying on his teacher and trying to destroy his business. The teenager gathered up a set of documents and gave them to his friend, who passed them on to Tarbell. She included them in the series.

Ida Tarbell 1905

The next time she saw Rogers, he went “white with rage,” demanding to know where she got the incriminating evidence. She wouldn’t tell him. But she did say, “You know this bookkeeping record is true.”

She had no more interviews with him about Standard Oil. But she acknowledged that he had made her understand the vastness and complexity of the company’s problems “and the amazing grasp with which it dealt with them.”

Ida Tarbell, ‘Misguided Woman’

She praised Rockefeller in the series, which became a book and ignited public anger against the Standard Oil monopoly.

He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded.

John D. Rockefeller, 1902

But she also described him as a “living mummy” with small, steady, expressionless eyes. “Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises,” she concluded.

He called her “that misguided woman” and “Miss Tarbarrel.” But he never responded publicly to her allegations.

Aftermath

Seven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil into 34 companies, including those now known as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Amoco, and Marathon Petroleum.

But if Ida Tarbell intended to impoverish John D. Rockefeller, she failed spectacularly. Rockefeller had undercapitalized his company, and in 10 years the value of its successor companies quintupled. He still had stock in them, Rockefeller went from a millionaire worth $300 million to nearly the first billionaire in history.

She moved to Easton, Conn., later taking in her mother and sister, then her brother and his wife. Every word she wrote after 1915 came from Easton.

Ida Tarbell House in Easton, now on the National Register of Historic Places

Eventually she left McClure’s and bought the American magazine with friends from the magazine, Lincoln Steffens and Stannard Baker. President Theodore Roosevelt labeled them “muckrakers.”

Tarbell continued to write about business, and she wrote biographies of Elbert Gary of U.S. Steel and Owen Young of General Electric. She traveled the lecture circuit and spent some time in Chicago doing social work at Jane Addams’ Hull House. Two presidents, Wilson and Harding, appointed her to commissions to investigate long work days and unemployment.

She was diagnosed with tuberculosis and Parkinson’s Disease, though her doctor didn’t tell her about the latter. She died in Bridgeport, Conn., of pneumonia at the age of 86. Her legacy includes the techniques and principles of modern investigative journalism.

New York University ranks The History of Standard Oil fifth on a list of the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism.

Images: Ida Tarbell House By Laurent Chaix – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17356774. Flatboat By Jason Pratt – originally posted to Flickr as Wooden Boat, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4191720.

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John Adams Skipped the Inauguration of His Successor

At 4 AM on a warm spring day, a stagecoach rumbled from the White House carrying the outgoing president of the United States. It was March 4, 1801, the day Thomas Jefferson would take the oath of office. But John Adams skipped the inauguration. Twenty-eight years later, his son would do the same thing.

Drawing of the White House, 1793.

In 231 years, only one other president voluntarily skipped the inauguration of the man who took his place. Though the peaceful transfer of power has been a hallmark of American democracy, “peaceful” doesn’t necessarily mean “cheerful.” And neither of the famously irascible Adams presidents felt particularly upbeat on the day he left office.

No law requires a president to show up for his successor’s inauguration. But the Adamses, Andrew Johnson and, in 2021, Donald Trump chose to absent themselves from the festivities.

The 2021 departure of Donald Trump from the presidency mirrors in some ways the events surrounding John Quincy Adams’ leave-taking. A mob broke through security at the Capitol and damaged a venerable symbol of the United States of America. But in 1829, the rabble rousers wanted to celebrate, not to disrupt.

Who Else Skipped the Inauguration

Only one other president refused to attend the president-elect’s inauguration: Andrew Johnson. His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, wouldn’t ride in a carriage with him to the Capitol. So Johnson stayed in the White House, signing legislation and presumably sulking.

The inauguration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. His predecessor did not show up.

Richard Nixon didn’t attend Gerald Ford’s inauguration ceremony because he didn’t have one scheduled. Ford simply took the oath of office in the East Room of the White House after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation.

Eight presidents couldn’t attend their successors’ inauguration because they died: (If you’re counting, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.)

John Adams Skipped the Inauguration of Jefferson

John Adams’ spirits were low on March 4, 1801.

Just 13 weeks earlier, his alcoholic son, Charles, died of cirrhosis of the liver. Abigail had returned to Quincy already. And he still smarted from the nasty campaign waged against him by Jefferson, his former friend, ally and vice president.

John Adams

Jefferson had hired a sleazy journalist, James Callendar, to write a hit piece on Adams. Callendar called him a half-mad warmonger who wanted to crown himself king. He also described Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Despite all that, Abigail had insisted on inviting Jefferson to the White House for tea and cake several weeks before the inauguration. Jefferson apparently went, but the conversation is lost to history.

When Adams skipped the inauguration of Jefferson, it didn’t go over well with the Massachusetts Spy. “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor,” reported the Spy. “It certainly would have had good effect.”

Jefferson’s Inauguration

Adams’ own inauguration had taken place in Philadelphia. During his presidency, he and Abigail had moved into the just-completed White House. Thomas Jefferson therefore became the first president inaugurated in Washington, D.C. More importantly, Jefferson’s inauguration marked the first time in U.S. history that one political party transferred power to another.

The U.S. Capitol around 1801, when Thomas Jefferson was first inaugurated as president.

Around noon, long after Adams’ departure, Jefferson walked to the Capitol accompanied by congressmen, marshals and military officers. He delivered a short speech in the U.S. Senate chamber and then took the oath of office from Chief Justice John Marshall, who he hated. The subject of his speech: reconciliation.

President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

He and Adams didn’t communicate for 12 years.

Three months after Jefferson took office, Abigail spied her husband in the fields, “swinging his sickle and muttering obscenities at his political opponents,” as Joseph Ellis put it in Founding Brothers.

JQA: Like Father, Like Son

John Quincy Adams skipped the inauguration of Andrew Jackson for much the same reason as his father skipped Jefferson’s. His own alcoholic son would die two months later.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Andrew Jackson had waged a malicious campaign, accusing Adams of wearing silk panties. In response, Adams called Jackson a drunk adulterer married to a bigamist. That backfired when Rachel Jackson died a month before the election.

Jackson won and arrived in Washington on Feb. 11, 1829. He didn’t call on Adams, and Adams didn’t call on him.

But Jackson had invited the Adamses to stay in the White House as long as they needed, even up to a month. He then realized his rooms at Gadsby’s Tavern couldn’t accommodate the large crowds coming to his inauguration. So Adams sent a federal marshal with the message that he could move into the White House on inauguration day. He then put a notice in the newspaper asking his friends not to visit him that day.

Gadsby’s Tavern in Alexandria, Va.

Adams moved out of the White House the night before the inauguration. Then he and his wife, Louisa, moved into a private home on Meridian Hill. During Jackson’s inaugural festivities, John Quincy Adams went horseback riding.

White House Mobbed

Ten thousand people came to Washington to see their hero take the oath of office. An estimated 21,000 people watched as Chief Justice John Marshall swore in Andrew Jackson on the East Portico of the Capitol. A ship’s cable held the crowd back from the steps.

Andrew Jackson was the first president sworn in on the Capitol steps. John Quincy Adams skipped the inauguration.

After taking the oath of office, Jackson left by a basement door on the west side of the Capitol. He rode a white horse to the White House as his admirers surged forward on the Capitol steps, breaking the ship’s cable.

Jackson had insisted on opening the White House to the public for a simple reception. He had ice cream and punch laced with whiskey served, the latter probably a mistake. His people crawled through the White House windows to get in before Jackson even arrived.

The party got out of hand, and the revelers smashed china and damaged furniture. The staff took the punch out to serve on the front lawn. “The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant,” said Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Jackson sneaked out of the White House and returned to Gadsby’s Tavern.

With thanks also to John Adams by David McCullough and Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’ Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan.

Images: Gadsby’s Tavern By Dmadeo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4781573.

This story updated in 2022.

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Six Fun Facts About Henry Adams

Henry Adams during his lifetime was known as a snob and a grouch. He was, after all, an Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents not known for their cheery dispositions — John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Today, two things distinguish Henry Adams in the public mind, neither particularly fun.

He did a lot of this.

First, he commissioned a famous bronze sculpture known as Grief, which stands in a Washington, D.C., park. Second, he wrote an unusual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

However, there’s a bit more to the 19^th-century historian and intellectual with the famous last name.

Henry Adams

Of his birth, Henry Adams commented, “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” He was born Feb. 16, 1838, the third son of Abigail Brooks Adams and Charles Francis Adams.

Young Adams had wealth, brains, prestige, social connections and the Adams pedigree. The Adams ancestry, however, could be a burden as well as a blessing. As Adams put it, your family considered you a failure if you didn’t get elected president of the United States.

Henry Adams

Henry Adams grew up in Boston with an 18^th century mindset that caused him bewilderment as railroads, steam engines and telegraphs proliferated. “He belonged to the eighteenth century,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “and the eighteenth century upset all his plans.”

After Harvard, he amused himself in Europe for a few years, ostensibly studying law. When his father won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859, he insisted his son accompany him to Washington, D.C., as his personal secretary. There he had a front row seat to the unfolding drama of the Civil War.

President Lincoln then appointed the senior Adams as minister to England. Charles Francis successfully kept the British from siding with the Confederacy, at least openly during the Civil War.

Henry began his writing career in England. Over his lifetime, he edited the prestigious North American Review, taught at Harvard, published biographies and essays, wrote two novels and a nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administration. His autobiography, published after he died, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Modern Library called it the best English nonfiction book of the 20^th century. .

Henry Adams, Failure

Though Henry wrote about history, he didn’t shape it as an Adams should–at least he thought so.

He spent 12 years writing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Then he figured only three serious people read it.

Frontispiece to Adams’ autobiography

He called his life ‘a broken arch.’

Henry Adams suffered a stroke in 1912 shortly after the Titanic sank. He had tickets for the return voyage to Europe. For a while he could still write letters to family and friends, but finally on March 27, 1918, he died in Washington, D.C., age 80.

Here are some fun—well, maybe fun-ish — things to know about Henry Adams.

1. He Had a Little Club With Its Own Stationery and Tea Service. As an Adult.

While living in Washington, D.C., Henry Adams and his wife Marion Hooper “Clover” Adam,s formed an intense friendship with Clarence King and Clara and John Hay. King, a geologist, had brains, drive and a secret African-American wife in New York City. Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s biographer, would become secretary of state for Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt.

John Hay, by John singer Sargent

Adams met Hay in Washington in 1861, when he served as his father’s personal secretary and Hay as Lincoln’s. Adams then introduced King to the rest of the group after meeting him in 1871. They gathered frequently at the Adams’ home after they moved to Washington in 1877, and remained close for the rest of their lives. Adams was so close to Hay that they built adjoining houses near the White House, the site of the Hay-Adams Hotel. In 1881, they decided to call themselves the Five of Hearts. All were about 40, except 32-year-old Clara Hay.

Clara Stone Hay

John Hay had stationery printed with a five of hearts monogram, which the club used to write to each other. King had a tea service made with the same motif and a clock face showing 5 p.m., when Clover served tea to the group.

Clarence King

Among the five, though, they had plenty of other friends – the most famous people of their age. Their circle included Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitmen, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Henry Hobson Richardson, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, every president from Lincoln to Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie.

2. He Left His Wife Out of His Autobiography.

Clover Adams committed suicide on Dec. 6, 1885 by drinking chemicals she used to develop photographs. Henry had married her at her father’s home in Beverly Farms, Mass., on June 27, 1872. He said he was wildly in love with her.

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

In the 467-page Education of Henry Adams, he didn’t once mention Clover. He also omitted the 12-1/2 years of his marriage from the book. Her death, he wrote, “smashed the life out of him.” Before she died, he had remained fairly stationary, but afterward he traveled extensively, to Japan, Hawaii, the South Seas, Mexico, Egypt, Britain, Cuba and Europe.

He commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a bronze sculpture of a draped figure to mark her grave in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. He urged Saint-Gaudens to use Buddhist devotional art as inspiration. The statue portrayed nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

Adams Monument. Henry is buried beside Clover.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

The sculpture became a tourist attraction, and people call it “Grief.” Adams hated the name, officially known as the “Adams Memorial.”

3. He Didn’t Think Much of Harvard.

His life, he wrote, was “a search for education the schools cannot give.’

He went to Harvard, he wrote in his autobiography, because his family always had. None of them, he wrote, ‘had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it.’

He also wrote the college offered ‘chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental.’

Henry Adams upon his graduation from Harvard.

“Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously,” he wrote.

But when Adams was 32, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot invited him to teach medieval history, about which he called himself ‘utterly and grossly ignorant.’ Adams took the job, though, and for six years taught a survey course of European history from the 10^th century to the 16^th.

4. He Had an Unrequited Love Affair for 35 Years.

Henry Adams met the beautiful Elizabeth Sherman Cameron in 1881, nearly five years before Clover committed suicide. A captivating hostess who read widely, she had a miserable marriage to a wealthy alcoholic U.S. senator. “Lizzie” led Adams on for 35 years, while flirting with Russian Prince Orloff, poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney, the sculptors Saint-Gaudens and Rodin and even John Hay.

Elizabeth Cameron Sherman

Did they ever consummate the relationship, which, according to their 35-years of letters, was mostly Platonic? Only they knew for sure. However, their friendship—or whatever it was—inspired plenty of gossip in their social circles.

When Henry suffered his stroke in 1912, Lizzie insisted on taking care of him. Henry’s sister Mary said no. “I won’t have her,” she said. Mary had concerns about the ‘disagreeable scandal’ and didn’t want tongues wagging about Lizzie coming from Paris to take charge of her brother’s care.

5. He Secretly Wrote a Best Selling Novel.

In 1880, Adams published a book called Democracy: An American Novel. An immediate best-seller, it prompted speculation about who wrote it and on whom did the author base his characters.

People thought maybe Adams’ friends, John Hay and Clarence King, wrote it. Or perhaps Clover Adams did it. Not until after his death in 1918 did his publishing company reveal he had written it.

Henry Adams playing with his dog.

Democracy tells the story of a ‘rather fast New York girl’ named Madeleine Lee who goes to Washington. She establishes a salon that attracts powerful men, and two fall in love with her. Each connives to get rid of his rival while the Bulgarian minister watches their machinations.

More than a century later, a Washington Post writer in 2005 gave it a positive review. “Democracy” is a joy — a worldly, profoundly knowing (and thus profoundly disenchanted), deliciously elitist social comedy…” The reason for the review: The Washington National Opera had performed an opera based on Adams’ novel in 2005.

Adams wrote his next novel, Esther, under a pseudonym, Frances Compton Snow. it didn’t sell too well.

6. He Believed Ulysses S. Grant Ruined His Life.

He moved to Washington in 1868 after working as his father’s secretary – and as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Boston Advertiser, as well as a contributor to the North American Review.

He prepared to make his mark in Washington as a political journalist. Full of ambition and conceit, he thought, perhaps, Ulysses S. Grant might tap him as an adviser when elected president of the United States in 1868. Some of his family friends already served in high office.

It didn’t happen. Young Henry Adams failed to win the right friends and influence the right people in the capital. He rubbed some people the wrong way. Invited to a White House dinner in 1870, he gave his own performance a glowing review. “I chattered with that blandness for which I am so justly distinguished,” he wrote, “and I flatter myself it was I who showed them how they ought to behave.” Well, not really.

Grant had no use for the Adams family.

President Grant

He failed to appoint Adams’ families friends to his Cabinet and cashiered others. He told his secretary the Adamses ‘did not possess one noble trait of character.’

“My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years. I am becoming more and more isolated as far as allies go,” wrote Henry Adams.

When Grant died, Adams offered up a bitter epitaph: “He had no right to exist.”

With thanks to The Education of Henry Adams by Carl Becker in the American Historical Review, April 1919 and Henry Adams and the Age of Grant by Brooks D. Simpson in the Hayes Historical Journal 1989. There’s a recent biography of Henry Adams called “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” by David S. Brown. You can help independent bookstores and the New England Historical Society by buying it here. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Hersey Tells the Truth About Hiroshima

After the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, the U.S. government censored the truth about the terrible carnage the atomic explosion wrought. John Hersey, a 32-year-old war correspondent, told the truth about it.

Bomb blast minutes after it went off over Hiroshima.

Hersey wrote 31,000 words that described in detail the effects of nuclear warfare on survivors. His editor at the New Yorker magazine decided to devote its entire Aug. 31, 1946 issue to it, something never done before or since. Roger Angell, a New Yorker editor, wrote that Hersey’s prose was “so stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis as to place each reader alone within scenes laid bare of all but pain.”

In 1999, the 36 members of New York University judged Hiroshima the finest piece of American journalism in the 20th century.

John Hersey

He was born June 17, 1914, the son of staunch Congregationalist parents, Grace Baird and Roscoe Hersey. They were so staunch they became YMCA missionaries to China, and John was born in Tientsin. He only spoke English as a second language. He learned to speak Chinese first.

His family came from old Puritan stock. His ancestor William Hersey settled Hingham, Mass., in 1635, along with a few others that included Abraham Lincoln’s ancestor.

John Hersey

At the age of 10, John Hersey returned to the United States, attending public school in New York and then the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. From there he went on to Yale, where he joined Skull and Bones and lettered in football. He then did graduate studies at Cambridge University. Soon afterward, he got a job working as a Time correspondent. In 1940, he went to the magazine’s Chongqing bureau then covered the fighting in Europe and Asia for Newsweek.

In the winter of 1945-46, Hersey reported on the reconstruction of Japan for the New Yorker. While in Japan, he read a reprint of the journal of a German missionary who survived the bombing in Time magazine. Hersey visited the missionary, who introduced him to others.

Six Survivors of Hiroshima

Those six survivors formed the nucleus of Hiroshima.

The book famously begins with the activities of those six characters when the bomb went off at exactly 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her desk and was turning her head to speak to the woman who sat next to her.

Hiroshima after the bombing

Dr. Masakazu Fujjii was sitting down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood at her kitchen window watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit, lay in his underwear on a cot on the third floor of his order’s three-story mission house reading a magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, walked down one of the hospital corridors carrying a blood specimen for a Wassermann test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hiroshima Methodist Church pastor, paused at the door of a rich man’s suburban house with a handcart full of things he had evacuated in fear of the bombing raid everyone expected.

A Sensation

Hersey described the bomb as a ‘tremendous flash of light cut across the sky’ that seemed like a ‘sheet of sun.’

“A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors,” wrote Hersey. “They still wonder why they lived when so many others died.”

In less than two years, the book had been reprinted in 80 periodical publications, translated into 11 languages and sold more than 600,000 copies.

Hiroshima in October 1945

“Its 31,000 words suffice because they abstain from the smallest judgment or moral positioning, and leave the reader to deal with the consequences and the questions,” wrote Angell. The restrained flow of his words, his characters’ conversations and the burnt-out city made it feel like an ancient tragedy, he wrote.

Unmatchable

“The achievement was unmatchable. Could he ever again write anything quite like it? “The puritan in Hersey told him not only that he couldn’t but also that he shouldn’t, or not with the same ease,” wrote his biographer, Jeremy Treglown.

Hersey went on to considerable achievement. He wrote two dozen books and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel A Bell for Adano, along with many other journalism prizes. He taught at Yale and served as master of one of its residential houses.

For many years, he lived on Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard. He married an ex-girlfriend of John F. Kennedy, Frances Ann Cannon. Over dinner in New York, Kennedy told Hersey the story of how his PT boat sank. Hersey wrote it for the New Yorker, later used as campaign literature for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

His second wife, Barbara Day, was the ex-wife of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. They had a summer home in Key West, which they shared with his friend Ralph Ellison. John Hersey died there on March 24, 1993.

Aftermath of Hiroshima

In 1985, Hersey wrote a follow-up to Hiroshima, again for the New Yorker. In it, he wrote,

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.”

With thanks to This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell and Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima by Jeremy Treglown. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Oldest Newspaper in Each New England State

Those quarrelsome publishers just love to argue over the honor of being the oldest newspaper in the United States. But which one deserves the title?

The Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, says it’s nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper. The Courant, though, lost its independence when purchased by the Times Mirror chain. Then the Tribune Corporation bought Times-Mirror.

The Rutland Herald started 30 years later than the Courant, but managed to stay independent. So now it can claim the distinction as the oldest newspaper owned by the same family in continuous operation, published under the same name in the same city, in the United States.

The New Hampshire Gazette also claims to be the oldest newspaper. However, since its founding in 1756 it has changed owners about 25 times, disappeared and merged with other publications.

The Newport Mercury, founded in 1759, was identified as the nation’s oldest newspaper during one of the New Hampshire Gazette‘s lulls. It didn’t quite disappear, having been published by The Newport Daily News as a weekly with reprinted daily stories for out-of-town subscribers. In 2018 it became Mercury Magazine.

Hartford Courant 1764

Thomas Green started the Connecticut Courant as a weekly on Oct. 29, 1764. It claims the title ‘America’s oldest continuously published newspaper’ and the slogan, ‘Older than the nation.’

Hartford printer Ebenezer Watson then took over the Connecticut Courant. Watson died suddenly of smallpox in late 1777, creating a dilemma for American patriots.

The British had shut down all the newspapers in Boston. Plus, New York’s Loyalist newspapers printed nothing but pro-British news. The Courant, as the only paper large enough to provide reliable (that is, pro-patriot) news, was viewed as crucial to maintaining popular support for the Revolution in New England.

Patriots approached Watson’s widow, Hannah Bunce Watson, and asked her to continue publishing the newspaper. She knew little about printing, but went ahead publishing the Courant to support the war effort. She made 20-year-old George Goodwin a business partner, as he had already worked for the newspaper for 12 years.

In 1779, she married Barzillai Hudson, and he took control of the newspaper. In 1837 the Connecticut Courant became the Hartford Courant, now the largest daily newspaper in Connecticut.

Bangor Daily News 1889

Richard J. Warren founded the Bangor Daily News on June 18, 1889, making it the oldest newspaper in Maine. In 1900 it merged it with the Bangor Whig and Courier. Today Warren’s great-grandson publishes the newspaper and his sister, Carolyn J. Mowers, serves as chairman of the board.

Though not as old as the Rutland Herald, the Bangor Daily News is a rarity in the newspaper business: a newspaper under the ownership of a single family. Today it’s the only newspaper in Maine owned independently. The BDN is also Maine’s largest, covering a readership area larger than Connecticut.

It did fail to publish once in its history: on Dec. 30, 1962, when a blizzard dumped five feet of snow on Bangor.

Daily Hampshire Gazette 1786

Massachusetts claims the oldest newspaper in the United States, the Boston News-Letter, but the Loyalist rag didn’t survive the Revolution. Founded in 1704 , it ceased publication when the British withdrew from Boston in 1776.

That leaves the Daily Hampshire Gazette, founded in 1786 in Northampton, Mass., as the oldest newspaper in the Bay State. In the first edition of the Hampshire Gazette, its 22-year-old publisher, William Butler, reported the news of Shay’s Rebellion. For more than a century the paper was published every week, but in 1890 it became a daily.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette went through a series of owners until its business manager, Harriet Williams DeRose, bought it in 1929. When she died in 1960, her son Charles Nathan DeRose took over. Charles died 10 years later and his two sons took over. By 2005, there were no more DeRoses interested in running the newspaper. That year Newspapers of New England, a chain based in Concord, N.H., bought the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

New Hampshire Gazette 1756

The New Hampshire Gazette has trademarked its claim as ‘The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,’ but not without dispute. The sassy alternative, published every two weeks, has appeared only intermittently on the journalism scene.

Daniel Fowle, the first man to print the words of Samuel Adams, founded the New Hampshire Gazette in Portsmouth in 1756. After he died in 1787, the Gazette continued publishing. In 1839, the Maryland Gazette went under and the Portsmouth Gazette was recognized as the nation’s oldest newspaper.

In the 1890s, the Portsmouth Herald began publishing the Gazette as a weekend supplement, changing its name to the Herald Weekend Edition in 1960. However, Daniel Fowle’s descendant Peter Fowle discovered in 1989 that the ‘Gazette’ name was no longer under trademark. He took the rights to the name and in 1999 began publishing the New Hampshire Gazette ‘episodically, in a very small format.’

Today it includes ‘The Fortnightly Rant,’ film reviews, two pages of history, stories from the New Hampshire Indymedia Collective, vintage news from the 19^th century and ‘Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide.’

Newport Mercury 1759

In 1759, Ann Smith Franklin and her son started the Newport Mercury in Newport, R.I., with the ‘freshest advices.’ She was Benjamin Franklin’s sister-in-law, the widow of his brother James (the one Ben didn’t get along with). Ann Smith Franklin and her son published the newspaper until she died in 1763.

Solomon Southwick, a patriot, took over the paper, but buried the press and type when the British landed in Newport. After the Revolution, he resumed publishing the newspaper.

The Newport Mercury has the distinction of first publishing an African-American woman, Phyllis Wheatley, in a newspaper.

Edward A. Sherman, owner of the Newport Daily News, bought the Newport Mercury in 1928 and published it as a paid weekly. In 2005, the News turned the Mercury into an alternative weekly, covering entertainment, food and the arts.

Mirroring the newspaper industry’s struggles, the Mercury became a once-monthly insert into the Newport Daily News in 2018.

Rutland Herald 1794

On Dec. 8, 1794, the Rev Samuel Williams and his distant cousin Judge Samuel Williams, both Federalists, founded the Rutland Herald. Three years later, William Fay bought the newspaper and for four decades devoted it to biblical parables, poems and homilies.

The newspaper’s readers got a welcome relief when abolitionist George Beaman bought it in 1844. From 1856 to 1882, the father-and-son team of George and Albert Tuttle turned the Rutland Herald into a daily and covered the Civil War. .

Rutland native Percival W. Clement bought the Herald in 1882, having bought the Rutland Railroad, the Clement National Bank, New York real estate and a brokerage house. He used the newspaper to promote his political ambitions, succeeding in 1918 by winning the race for Vermont governor.

In 1927, P.W. Clements died and his son-in-law, William H. Field, moved back to Rutland to run the newspaper. Field, a co-founder of the New York Daily News, markedly improved the Herald. His son ran it until Robert W. Mitchell became owner-publisher in 1948. Mitchell’s son, R. John Mitchell, succeeded his father when he died in 1993.

Images: Bangor Daily News By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22888057; Shays Rebellion By Shockabrah – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58001789

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Norman Rees, Mild-Mannered Russian Spy Next Door in Southbury, Conn.

In 1942, the United States and the Soviet Union allied in the fight against Germany during World War II. Norman Rees, an engineer who specialized in petroleum, began sympathizing with the communist cause and started helping the Russians. For the next 30 years he never stopped.

Seminole oil field, Oklahoma (Library of Congress)

Norman Rees

He was born Nuncio Ruisi in Sicily around 1906. Little is known about his early life. He married and had a son named John. He became an engineer, with an expertise in metallurgy, piping and holding tanks for oil under pressure. By 1942, Rees worked for an oil consulting firm called M.W. Kellogg, then in New York City. A fellow employee asked him to help the Russians, and he agreed.

He then went to work for Mobil Oil — now ExxonMobil. In 1956, he received credit for a co-patent on a gas lift, a kind of pump in which the injection of gas creates bubbles that lift oil from the reservoir.

All the while, however, the Sicilian-born Rees secretly helped the Russians develop their domestic oil industry.

Russia’s oil reserves in the Caucasus were one of the main reasons Hitler invaded the country in 1941. But Russia lagged other countries in exploiting the oil.

Rees made his biggest contribution to the Russian oil industry in 1950, when he shared a technology that greatly improves the yield of gasoline from crude oil. He also provided the Russians with designs for petroleum processing plants and equipment.

One analyst said that Rees was the single most important figure in the development of the Russian oil industry between 1945 and 1960.

The grateful Russian nation awarded Rees a medal for his activities and granted him a pension, in addition to some $30,000 for his help. The United States, however, no longer having an alliance with the USSR after the conclusion of World War II, viewed Rees as an enemy spy.

Double Agent

Norman Rees

In 1971, the FBI approached Rees. The engineer lived in a retirement community, Heritage Village, in Southbury, Conn., though he still did some consulting. A neighbor told the New York Times he always thought him a conservative who voted Republican.

The FBI had learned of his spying activities. The agency did not want to arrest him, but to use Rees as a double agent. For the next four years, Rees would keep up his contacts with the Russian government. Now, however, the FBI tailed him to all his meetings, using them to identify Russian operatives in the United States.

Late in 1975, two reporters for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper learned of Rees’ activities. They confronted him, and Rees admitted his spying to them. He had long ago come to regret his activities. “Looking back on it now, it’s enough to make me sick,” he said.

The reporters pressed Rees about whether he had ever helped Julius and Ethel Rosenberg pass nuclear secrets to the Russians. He took a polygraph, but it was not conclusive.

In February of 1976, Norman Rees told the newspaper he would kill himself if the paper published its story. When it did publish, he shot himself with a .38 in his home. His wife heard the gunshot and found his body. His family was astonished when the story emerged, and the incident prompted a debate about the proper role of the media.

This story was updated in 2022.

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