A Review of Mary E. Tomkins' Biography of Ida M. Tarbell

Date Published: July 31, 2025

“Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins

• Reviews of the Day: 1974–75
• Selected Insights from “Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins
• This Author’s Thoughts on “Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins

​Reviews of the Day: 1974–75

-     Only One Review and One Article Over the Past Fifty Years 

Only one true review—a very short analysis of the book, was found since the publication of this work in 1974.

In "The Journal of American History’s” September 1975 issue, Roger E. Wyman wrote:

“Mary E. Tomkins’ account of Tarbell’s career lacks incisiveness and contains too much in the way of synopses of her writings as opposed to analysis. Nevertheless, it presents a fairly balanced interpretation of Tarbell’s place in early twentieth-century America. … A major weakness of the book is its failure to explore Tarbell’s views in depth and to put them into a coherent framework and her views on women and feminism are a prime example. Tomkins claims that Tarbell believed in “complementary” rather than “literal” equality but never explains what that means. …

“Tomkins never adequately analyzes either the source of Tarbell’s views or the implications of her writings for the women who read them.”

Since the publication of “Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins through Twayne Publishers Inc., there has been only the review above and one article in the public newspapers. This article was republished twice in two different Michigan newspapers and it was merely a summary of the book’s contents with little qualitative analysis.

On November 27, 1974 in The Petoskey News-Review, Fran Murray, the author of this article, did not claim any knowledge of or proficiency in the life, career or work of Ida M. Tarbell and it shows in the article’s simple repetition of the information from the book. It offers no qualitative analysis. On January 3, 1975, The News-Palladium of Benton Harbor, Michigan carried this same article under the title, “Early Woman Journalist Called Cultural Heroine.”
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From the lack of reviews, it appears that this book of Mary Tomkins garnered little interest.

Selected Insights from “Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins

​-     Mary E. Tomkins’ Perspective on Tarbell’s Biographies of Elbert H. Gary and Owen D. Young​

Mary E. Tomkins wrote the following concerning Ida M. Tarbell's books on Elbert H. Gary (Judge Gary) and Owen D. Young.

“These last two biographies [about Elbert H. Gary and Owen D. Young] are … more properly classified as business propaganda than as biography, since they are a study of a way of life that Tarbell is defending.

"That way of life … is the Anglo-American Protestant, antebellum way of the New England wing of the movement which erected in America the sole genuinely Protestant nation in history. … Tarbell’s effort had been to find her way toward a synthesis of golden past and gilded present.

​"Gary and Young can thus be considered legitimate offspring of the proprietors of her American Eden and not as the spawn of the serpent.”

It appears that Mary E. Tomkins wanted to position two of America’s greatest twentieth-century business leaders—Elbert H. Gary and Owen D. Young as “spawns of the serpent.” One has to wonder if she ever read any of the material in these biographies, studied the men herself, or even considered some of the positive reviews of the day on these two works [See the sidebar].

Ida M. Tarbell wrote in great detail about such individuals, their businesses, and their business practices in three of her works: “New Ideals in Business,” “The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel,” and “Owen D. Young: A New Type of Industrial Leader.” 

Rather than seeing the biography of Elbert H. Gary as “business propaganda,” The New York Times saw it as a reflection of Ida M. Tarbell’s “highly developed sense of fairness.”​

Ida M. Tarbell responded to such criticism as that of Mary E. Tomkins’ when Miss Tarbell wrote the following in Owen D. Young’s biography:

“And after all I have never been one who felt that the praise of him you believe to be a good man is a shame to a writer, any more than I have felt the condemnation of a man you believe evil is a particular virtue in a writer. A biographer’s business is to set down as faithfully as he can what he finds and that I have tried to do in writing this sketch of Owen D. Young.”

In this, Tarbell refused to be “typecast” as a muckraker, and it appears that Tomkins did not agree with Tarbell’s view that a biographer’s business is to set down what he or she finds as faithfully as they can … whether it is evil or good.

​-     Mary E. Tomkins Removes an Article Excerpt from Its Context

Mary E. Tomkins wrote the following of Tarbell in Chapter Six: “The American Years:”

“Tarbell’s insistence on independence seems reason enough for her avoidance of marriage; in addition, her ineradicable [stubborn] aloofness probably caused hints at a distaste for connubial [wedded] domesticity such as appeared in a much reprinted article written for ‘The American Magazine’ about Chicago’s Domestic Relations Court, a new approach toward dealing with social problems.

“In the article she thus characterized matrimony: ‘ There are in the city of Chicago, let us say, five hundred thousand pairs of men and women who have undertaken to spend their lives in the appalling intimacy of marriage--to create homes where they may rear children.’ ”

Unfortunately, Mary E. Tomkins failed to publish the title of the article by Ida M. Tarbell: “A Court of Hope and Goodwill: There is No Finer Function of Authority than the Settlement of Human Differences.” The title of the article is not in alignment with the inadequate excerpt above.

​Professor Tomkins also fails to include what Miss Tarbell wrote immediately after the excerpt. These additional words offer a very realistic, hopeful and insightful context for the sentence. They offer further thoughts and insights into Tarbell’s viewpoint on family.

Select this image to read the full article “A Court of Hope and Goodwill” by Ida M. Tarbell.

“However convinced one may be that the greatest development and the most abiding satisfaction come to the average man and woman through the family, a person cannot but be staggered by the demand it makes on freedom, effort, and capacity. At one point or another of the alliance, both the man and woman almost invariably break down. Everything then depends on character, the sense of the obligation to correct, to take fresh hold.

“There is an amazing percentage of fair success in marriage. Personally, I am inclined to believe that it is in this relation [of marriage] that life’s most terrible battles are fought … and the most stupendous victories gained. Nevertheless, there are many failures. They range in degree from patient acceptance of the situation to open rupture.

“In this gamut of failures there is a percentage in which the wronged party appeals to the law for help. … It is with these cases--particularly those where children are involved, that the Court of Domestic Relations was created to deal.”

Possibly the reader of Tomkins’ excerpt might also question the usage of a single word: appalling. But, maybe, if the reader had sat in the courtroom next to Miss Tarbell and observed the following, the word “appalling” might seem to ring true. Tarbell sat in these Chicago family courtrooms and observed. This was only a summary after she patiently spent research hours in the family courtrooms and wrote pages of observations documenting the court’s successes and its sometimes unavoidable failures in some appalling, unsolvable family cases involving children.

“When one sits day after day and watches the stream of warring, hating, broken men and women, children between them, fill the court rooms, hears their histories, tragic and comic, ignoble and pathetic, a person breaks down under the strain of it.

“It seems as if a tidal wave of sordid woe had engulfed humanity. …

“It is only when one remembers that of the five hundred thousand pairs of married men and women in Chicago these are all that have come to open rupture of this kind, that hope returns. … It is less than a half of one percent.”
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One of Ida M. Tarbell’s great strengths as a reporter was her on-site research, observation, and wonderfully compassionate nature. Mary E. Tomkins should have spent a few months in Chicago’s Court of Domestic Appeals or some similar setting. ​One wonders that if Professor Tomkins had sat in those family courtrooms for days on end, if she too might have “broken down under the strain of it.” 

This Author’s Thoughts on “Ida M. Tarbell” by Mary E. Tomkins

Aside from some miscellaneous articles written for academia, this work appears to have been the only book published by Mary E. Tomkins. After reading this book, this author has concluded that Mary E. Tomkins reveals more about her own beliefs and personal biases than she offers insightful information into Ida M. Tarbell’s.

Mary Tomkins refers to Miss Tarbell three times as a “spinster” for her choice to remain unmarried for her eighty-six years—a term even more derogatory in ‘74 than it is today, and more than twelve times and in various ways refers negatively to Ida M. Tarbell’s “white, rigid, middle-class, moralistic, Anglo-Saxon, puritan, Protestant,” perspectives which could be summarized as: expecting one to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, or finding one’s place in society through hard work, effort and individualism, or while being supportive of the goals of feminism being outspoken against any divisive means or methods used to achieve those goals.
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This author recommends that any reading of this book start with the very last chapter with a special attention to the last few sentences:

”Her [Ida M. Tarbell’s] one great work, ‘The History of the Standard Oil Company,’ remains a timeless philippic [denunciation] that denounces the American Sin.

“She posed in it a question not yet resolved: Can democracy and corporate capitalism coexist?”

Select this image to read book reviews of other Tarbell writings.

The reader should then question if this supposition by Tomkins of Miss Tarbell is truly supported as they read the earlier chapters of this work. Miss Tarbell never used the term “American Sin” in any of her works. In the “History of the Standard Oil Company,” Ida M. Tarbell was not highlighting an “American Sin” but highlighting the business practices of one individual who as the head of one corporation used unscrupulous tactics against those he competed against. Consistent in her views, whether it was a corporation or feminism she always examined the means used to attain any goal, and it was often within the “means” she found problems. Miss Tarbell did not truly believe that there was evil in just being big and successful.
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This author believes this biography by Mary E. Tomkins on Ida M. Tarbell is not very scholarly, and more than anything else reflects the biases of the author, not the person who is the subject of the book: Ida M. Tarbell. It is this author’s opinion that it was Mary E. Tomkins who believed that capitalism and democracy were at odds with each other and that a capitalist driven economy could not support a democratically driven social society.

​This was not what Ida M. Tarbell believed and, thus, Tomkins was too many times negative on the positive aspects within Tarbell’s material.

Ida M. Tarbell wrote about her belief that both economic and social organizations needed and could adapt positively around men and women who believed and worked within the guidelines of the Golden Rule. In support of this belief, Miss Tarbell held up individuals such as Owen D. Young of General Electric and Elbert H. Gary of the United States Steel Corporation—who Mary E. Tomkins shamelessly attacks in this work.

Miss Tarbell also studied and wrote about corporations such as Metropolitan Life Insurance Company caring for its 15,000 employees with tuberculosis, Procter and Gamble’s attempts to help its alcoholic employees, Baker Manufacturing Company’s employee profit sharing initiatives, and the Norton Company’s assisted financing of employee’s homes … to only name a few.

Mary Tomkins shared none of this information. She apparently could not conceive that some individual leaders pursued such policies as simply great business practices that returned value to their corporations through improved productivity and teamwork. [See Footnote #1]

This author wonders if the only way that Mary Tomkins would have been complimentary of Ida M. Tarbell’s works after “The History of Standard Oil Corporation” was if Miss Tarbell had remained a “muckraker—the person who finds the negative in everything, highlights it and calls for change.” Unfortunately, such an approach leaves unanswered the question: “Change to what?”

This was one of several series of books published by Twayne Publishers, Inc. This series focused on individuals in “American Literature.”​

Ida M. Tarbell was a great enough journalist to answer this question by adapting her approach over time and publishing the positive facts about those who walked the proper path. In her only novel, “The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport” she lets her belief resonate in the words spoken by one of her chief protagonists to a friend—who happened to be an editor-in-chief of a local newspaper:

“You’re spoiling for a fresh turn with the muck rake. You can’t make a garden with one tool. You must have several. … I’m serious! … You’re like the men in the mines that will tackle but one job—always swinging a pick. The muck rake did its job in Sabinsport for some time.
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“Now, you’ve got to pass on to the next tool.”

Ida M. Tarbell used every tool that was available to and within her journalistic capabilities, which included highlighting those doing good within the capitalist economic system. Although her reputation started as a muckraker, she understood that the “muck rake” could not be her “only” tool to effect change. Throughout her later works, she sought those individuals on paths, which if emulated, might produce a few gardens within our existing economic, social and political ecosystems.

Apparently, Mary E. Tomkins would have preferred Miss Tarbell to remain an eternal muckraker, as it would have more closely aligned with some of Tomkins’ beliefs about capitalism.

Like Ida M. Tarbell, I prefer highlighting the positive—while not ignoring or discounting the negative. Write about the good—expose the bad, and expect those worthy of the calling to recognize the difference. This biography is a bad summarization of the life, perspectives and accomplishments of Ida M. Tarbell.

​In its place, I recommend a good read: “All in a Day’s Work.”

Cheers,
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- Peter E.

Ida M. Tarbell’s “New Ideals in Business” is a book of hope.

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[Footnote 1] It should be duly noted that Mary Tomkins failed miserably to unionize the Michigan State University in February 1973—the year before the publication of this book. William E. Cote a correspondent in the state capitol bureau of Booth Newspapers, characterized the vote against unionization as a “record turnout” in which over sixty percent of the faculty voted against unionization. Mary E. Tomkins promised to work constructively for “the loyal opposition” of forty percent.

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