PRINTTaking on Tarbell
Weinberg seeks truth with a capital “T”
Courtesy of www.norton
May 1, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
MU professor Steve Weinberg mentions that he’s not yet working on a new book. He says teaching this fall will delay the start of any new projects. Weinberg just spent the past 10 years pouring his energy into his seventh book, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller. During this time, he also completed his eighth book, A Journalism of Humanity: A Candid History of the World’s First Journalism School. But his current favorite, Taking on the Trust, is attracting attention from national book critics.
Weinberg doesn’t take his research lightly: In Taking on the Trust, Weinberg’s investigative reporting kicks into gear. He explored journalist Ida Tarbell’s exposé into Rockefeller’s dubious tactics as the head of the Standard Oil Company, the largest corporate trust of the early 20th century.
In 1902, McClure’s magazine began publishing Tarbell’s 19-part investigative series, but her pieces were soon combined into an 800-page book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, in 1904. Her investigative reports helped lead to the 1911 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that split Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company into 33 separate corporations. Weinberg admired that: “She happened to take on the most powerful man at that time and the most powerful corporation at that time.”
He hopes the book will restore Tarbell’s story. “She deserves it,” he says. “She’s a ‘she.’ She had a lot more boundaries to cross. She is mostly forgotten.”
But Tarbell’s and Rockefeller’s lifetimes were one boundary Weinberg found necessary to cross. One national critic acknowledges this parallel as a benefit to Weinberg’s narrative.
“Weinberg’s Taking on the Trust is the first book aimed entirely at narrating their epic clash and their surprisingly intertwined personal histories,” writes Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal. “Indeed, his deeply researched account is scrupulously evenhanded, fair to both the man who was by far the nation’s richest tycoon and the woman who was its most famous reporter.”
Weinberg’s book was published in late March. The 10 years it took to write a book isn’t abnormal for Weinberg. No book of his has ever taken this long to write, but some have taken nearly as long. This is his pace. “It’s just sort of who I am,” he says. “Someone who takes a long time and digs deep to find the truth with a capital ‘T.’ I like to give readers context, depth and breadth.”
Weinberg says that accessing the archives of Tarbell and Rockefeller was easy: Tarbell’s archives were found in rural northwestern Pennsylvania where she lived, and Rockefeller’s were in upstate New York. Weinberg made three trips to Meadville and Titusville, Penn., where he devoted up to a month at a time to reading the thousands of letters to and from Tarbell and examining family documents, oral histories, filings from civil lawsuits and drafts of articles and books. Weinberg says accessing this information was easy because no one was still alive to block his research efforts.
What posed the most difficulty for Weinberg was taking on a second project. Five years into his research, he accepted an invitation to write A Journalism of Humanity: A Candid History of the World’s First Journalism School, which focuses on — you guessed it — MU’s j-school history.
Juggling both projects demanded rigorous attention to lingering deadlines and heavy research. Writing, Weinberg says, is never simple or easy. “It’s rewriting, rethinking,” he says. “You can’t just report and write. There are profitable ways to think about material.”
He does his best writing early in the morning, in the basement of his home from 12 a.m. to 3 a.m., or from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., or both. He says he doesn’t need much sleep.
When writing Taking on the Trust, Weinberg says he not only expected the “80 billion comments” he got back from his editor but also was grateful for them. “It’s better that way than to have an editor to look at it and say, ‘That’s OK,’” he says.
Weinberg believes this editorial truism, even though the process can be long and sometimes frustrating. “Any fear you can conquer once you know you can do it,” he says. “You may not enjoy it, but you probably won’t die. Sooner or later it’s going to come out in print.”
He’s resting easy these days, but it probably won’t be too long before the nagging itch to write catches up with him again.
