Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We talked all this week
Speaker 1: about Ida Tarbell and the history of the Standard Oil
Speaker 1: company that she wrote Breakup of Standard Oil A really
Speaker 1: weird coincidence, which was not why I chose this piece.
Speaker 1: I chose it, as I said, because I was listening
Speaker 1: to se Non Radio and I emailed myself from my
Speaker 1: yard to be like, do this podcast. But literally, as
Speaker 1: I was researching and writing it, a bunch of the
Speaker 1: successor companies to Standard Oil, we're doing congressional hearings about
Speaker 1: deceiving people about whether climate change is real. And I
Speaker 1: was like, man, this is causing me to just have
Speaker 1: a lot of feelings, a lot of feelings. Uh. I
Speaker 1: had this like tandem feeling of like man's uh iditar
Speaker 1: Bell did this all this amazing work. She she led
Speaker 1: to the breakup of this company that had a lot
Speaker 1: of unfair business practices, but also people involved with it
Speaker 1: didn't really have any kind of consequences and made a
Speaker 1: whole lot more more money. And now this is happening. Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: repercussions there now a hundred and something years later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a lot of circular brain time spent on
Speaker 1: that while working on this. Right, That's one of the
Speaker 1: things I think we've all bumped up against it where
Speaker 1: there's like the despondency of studying history and realizing that,
Speaker 1: like the hubrisk of modern man is to always think
Speaker 1: we have come farther than any previous people. Um, but
Speaker 1: humankind is still making the same mistakes over a numbers,
Speaker 1: sometimes even when you're waving a sign that outlines those
Speaker 1: mistakes very clearly, uh, and be very very frustrating. This
Speaker 1: was also an interesting episode for me to research because
Speaker 1: a lot of what she was investigating, Uh, the reason
Speaker 1: these practices were either frowned upon or illegal or both
Speaker 1: was because of what the idea of capitalism is supposed
Speaker 1: to be like in the United States, Like, there's this
Speaker 1: idea that capitalism is supposed to involve healthy competition within
Speaker 1: free markets, and it's like resting on that idea if
Speaker 1: then you go and collude with the railroads to get
Speaker 1: yourself rates that no one else can have so that
Speaker 1: you have this unfair business advantage, that's totally the wrong
Speaker 1: thing to do. But there were and still are people
Speaker 1: who were like they were just doing maybe they were
Speaker 1: making good business deals. They had the power to make
Speaker 1: good business deals, so why not. Holly is making a
Speaker 1: face that our listeners cannot see, but man, it is
Speaker 1: a grimace, you know. It's that thing where there I
Speaker 1: think two prongs to this that are inherently problematic, right.
Speaker 1: One is that there is a tendency for some folks
Speaker 1: to like trust in that, you know, good healthy competition
Speaker 1: of capitalism, on the presumption that there will be enough
Speaker 1: morality in play that no one will do things to
Speaker 1: really hurt other people, which then gets kind of accluded
Speaker 1: by that other thing you mentioned of people going, yes,
Speaker 1: but they're just making good business decisions. The problem isn't.
Speaker 1: On paper, things that are good business decisions in terms
Speaker 1: of numbers and money are often terrible decisions for fellow humans, Yes,
Speaker 1: including the entire planet at this point. Yeah, That's why
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna give another shout
Speaker 1: out to the c Non radio podcast that inspired this episode.
Speaker 1: The entire season as is not out yet as of
Speaker 1: when we are recording this, and I think there's probably
Speaker 1: an episode that that has not dropped yet that exists
Speaker 1: as of when we are recording this behind the scenes. Um,
Speaker 1: but the first four episodes are sort of a big
Speaker 1: picture historical arc of like, how did we get to
Speaker 1: this point where we are in the West's relationship to
Speaker 1: the planet that is so contrary to the relationship of
Speaker 1: so many UH indigenous peoples who are not lumped in
Speaker 1: generally as part of quote the West. And then part
Speaker 1: five starts with looking at things that are happening right
Speaker 1: now in the Earth today where we can see what's
Speaker 1: happening and we can like see the evidence of the
Speaker 1: impact that the climate is happening. So it can be
Speaker 1: tough to listen to, but also really important to listen
Speaker 1: to and also incredibly well done. The other point that
Speaker 1: I would want need to make sure to make was, Wow,
Speaker 1: Ida tar Bell is just so fascinating and complicated to me,
Speaker 1: because if you just take any one piece out of
Speaker 1: her biography, like if you look only at writing the
Speaker 1: history of a Standard oil company, she can seem like
Speaker 1: somebody who was like a dedicated anti capitalist. Totally not
Speaker 1: true if you look at just that and the fact
Speaker 1: that she was an investigative journalist and had a college
Speaker 1: degree at a time when most women could not go
Speaker 1: to college because colleges weren't admitting women. Like you can
Speaker 1: think that she was an early example of feminism when
Speaker 1: she was decidedly anti feminist and a lot of her opinions,
Speaker 1: there's so many pieces of it. If you just say
Speaker 1: this one little slice, you get a very different picture
Speaker 1: from like Ida Tarbell as a whole, which is is
Speaker 1: there's a beautiful parallelism right between that and her research
Speaker 1: in France where she was going and thinking she was
Speaker 1: establishing Madame Roland in one way, and it was like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: she's all complicated and contradictory, and I'm like, yeah, look
Speaker 1: at yourself. All of us are. That's not even a
Speaker 1: finger point. But like, no one is. No one is
Speaker 1: a simple machine, right. We all have contradictory things that
Speaker 1: we we hold in our hearts as though they are
Speaker 1: completely normal to coexist. But it is very funny when
Speaker 1: she's like, ah, this woman not what I thought. Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way I thought was going to happen, women's
Speaker 1: rights not so much. I also was just incredibly fascinated
Speaker 1: by the story of her father having to return home
Speaker 1: on foot and just stopping at small towns to be like,
Speaker 1: can I teach your kids for a little bit so
Speaker 1: I can earn enough money? Are like barter for some
Speaker 1: new shoes. It's a different world. Can you imagine if
Speaker 1: someone came to your door today, presuming you were a parent,
Speaker 1: and said, can I teach your kids for a little while,
Speaker 1: would you be like get Yeah? That Actually that came
Speaker 1: up in her story and other contexts of like living
Speaker 1: in an oil boom town in the latter half of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. How it was just totally common practice
Speaker 1: for people who needed money to show up on a
Speaker 1: person's store step and be like, hey, do you have
Speaker 1: any work I can do? Uh, you know, getting a
Speaker 1: little money or getting a meal or whatever. How that
Speaker 1: was just like how the world operated. And that is
Speaker 1: not how the world operates here where we're living now.
Speaker 1: I know in other places of the world that's not
Speaker 1: necessarily the case. But yeah, it was like it just
Speaker 1: this totally different way that society worked. So my last
Speaker 1: thing that I just found so delightful was the story
Speaker 1: about the fraternity pins. The weird dramas of different social
Speaker 1: structures are ceaselessly entertaining. Yeah. Well, and also that was
Speaker 1: like a slightly different nuance of wearing somebody's pin than um, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm most familiar with the idea of getting pinned you
Speaker 1: are now somebody's steady significant other, and this wasn't exactly that,
Speaker 1: but also kind of had some of that flavor. And
Speaker 1: so just wearing four different pins to chapel giant problem.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine anyway, She's so complicated, but I still
Speaker 1: really love her. So I'm glad. I'm glad. I emailed
Speaker 1: myself from my yard to we like do this podcast? Uh,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to send us a note, We're at
Speaker 1: History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. And since
Speaker 1: it's Friday, Happy Friday, everybody, whatever is on your plate
Speaker 1: for the weekend. We hope it goes super well. We
Speaker 1: will be back tomorrow with a classic episode from somewhere
Speaker 1: in the back catalog, and we will be back Monday
Speaker 1: with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class
Speaker 1: is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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