German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s mental breakdown on 3 January 1889 when he stayed at number six, Via Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy. There, a coach driver was having trouble with a “stubborn” horse. The horse refused to move, whereupon the driver lost his temper and took his whip to it. Nietzsche was greatly disturbed and threw his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His neighbor took him home, where he lay motionless and silent for two days on a divan, until he muttered the words “Mutter, ich bin dumm” (Mother, I am stupid). He lived for another ten years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters.
The random cycling of associations in our minds as we gaze blankly into space may yield an occasional good idea but it cannot be called thinking. Thinking functions by intention. It requires bending our daydreams into a line of thought that has purpose and direction. To ‘think’, we must tackle the mass of associative material circulating in our minds, methodically sift through it and reduce it to an essential conclusion.
This is particularly needed in inner farming, where we quickly accumulate observations on all aspects of ourselves. We observe our Body, Essence, and Personality; their postures, moods, and thinking patterns; their contradictory desires; the way they compete over resources; their useful and wasteful functioning; and the ongoing challenge of infusing them with attention. Though revelatory, this mass of self-knowledge by itself does not affect inner change. On the contrary; it is bound to impede our farming unless we winnow it down to actionable understandings. Of what use is my ability to recognize haste if I cannot curb it? Of what use is my ability to see my fears, concerns, and anxieties, if I remain their slave?
Our thinking function facilitates this refinement. It can retain something we’ve understood long after the experience that triggered our understanding has faded. In addition, it can encapsulate this understanding into a sentence or even a word that can rekindle the understanding when the same, or a similar experience recurs. In this way, our thinking function’s ability to entertain in its mind’s eye things that don’t necessarily exist here and now, expands to encompass our understanding.
We began applying this ability already from our first days of inner farming, when we related what we observed to the divisions given us by this teaching. When we saw unnecessary fidgeting, we attributed it to the ‘moving function,’ associative daydreaming to the ‘thinking function,’ unwarranted worries to the ‘emotional function,’ and so forth. By doing this, we were using our thinking function to detach the sense of ‘I’ from what we observed. In assigning what we observed to a particular function, we were indirectly affirming that it was only a small part of ourselves and not us in our entirety.
August invites us to take this a step further. It is one thing to observe our psychological manifestations in a particular moment, and another to witness their consequences through time. The former deals with only a piece, the latter with the whole puzzle. Observing our habits through time deepens our realization of the price we pay for them. Our thinking function can help us see how our daydreaming isolates us from reality, how our haste constantly overlooks the emotional dimension of our day, or how our chronic negative attitude taints everything we do with an attitude of defeatism. Thanks to its power over abstraction, our thinking function can help us encompass this long body of experience, quantify it, and encapsulate it into one word, or the shortest phrase possible. The next time we catch ourselves daydreaming, or hurrying, or brooding, by intoning that phrase we place the habit face to face with its cumulative price. This gives us a much stronger motivation to resist it.
Those who have yet to accumulate a sufficient mass of such observations can start by asking themselves the following question: If I were transported back to a year ago, and were given the chance to briefly speak with my younger self, what words of advice might I give myself? What self-knowledge would spare me much time and suffering? Encapsulate this advice into the briefest command.
The practitioner who formulates their advice in the briefest possible manner—and applies it in a moment of internal challenge—is like a farmer who has threshed and winnowed his wheat into grain. The grain encapsulates the blueprint of the entire plant and retains its vitality long after the plant’s demise. So can our thinking function retain our understanding long after the experience that triggered it has faded, and recall it in the moment of need.
This is our labor for August.
ABOUT THE SCHOOL Our projects are undertaken with the understanding that a school must give back. It must harness the talent and resources of its members to form an expression that can outlast them.Learn more about the School of the Old New Method
WATCH AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP Learn more about the Old New Method – Watch recordings of our online gatherings that introduce the knowledge and practical methods we use.Available through purchase. View Workshops ABOUT THE FOUNDER I had no structural foundation at my disposal, no institution, no location, no following — only the conviction that these truths were pertinent to contemporary seekers… Drawing inspiration from the agricultural metaphor embedded in ancient wisdom, I arranged the central concepts into twelve monthly labors, creating a yearly cycle of symbolic cultivation tasks… Soon, a hundred people committed to practicing this cyclical teaching on a regular basis. This was the beginning of my school.”Read the full autobiographical note by Asaf Braverman ABOUT THE TEACHING Nature develops us only up to a certain point and then leaves us unfinished, just as it creates wheat but not bread, milk but not butter, grapes but not wine…Learn more about our teaching
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
When Americans discuss the Founders, there’s always a cloud of shame hanging overhead. One might like many things about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but it’s impossible to forget that these men participated in the horrific system of human bondage. A few of the Founders, though, stand out for opposing it outright.
Thomas Paine was one such figure. Paine—an author and political philosopher—was born in Thetford, England. His friend Benjamin Franklin helped him get established in Philadelphia upon his arrival to the colonies in 1774. There, he wrote the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and swept early America. The pamphlet became the defining argument for America’s independence—for many Americans, both the first and the most persuasive argument for severing allegiance to the British king, or to any king.
In many ways, Paine was a fiercer supporter of democracy than many of the more celebrated Founding Fathers, whose mistrust of the “common people” led them to put limits on voting rights and popular representation in the halls of government. Those were limits that Paine also opposed outright.
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today.
“I think most people know him largely because of his pamphlet Common Sense, which came out in 1776 and had an impact on galvanizing Americans in favor of independence from Britain,” William Hogeland, an author and historian who focuses on the founding era, told The American Prospect. “It was dramatic because he attacked the idea of the British Constitution and said, basically, they have no constitution. Where is this constitution? Because it wasn’t written down. He attacked the idea that the Crown was part of a constitutional, balanced government.”
Paine portrayed the king as a “royal brute,” Hogeland says. This was seen as somewhat extreme at the time, because even colonists who favored independence weren’t that critical of the king. For that reason, Common Sense helped lay the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence, which also excoriated King George at length.
“The pamphlet sells extremely well, whether it’s in Charleston or Boston. Maybe … the idea is not completely alien. It’s more that he finds a way to make the case, and the case looks pretty appealing in his hands,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Prospect. “It’s less than six months before the Declaration of Independence becomes the actualization of what he’s proposed in his little pamphlet.”
Paine became quite influential in early America. He also seems to have had a personality that was sometimes difficult for people to accept. He knew what he believed and was not willing to waver from those beliefs. To read about him is to envision a passionate, stubborn man who might have had a hard time keeping friends.
“We gather from reading about him that he was very intense in his personality, but also he had a friendly, casual quality,” Hogeland says. “I think a lot of people see Paine as just like a very adroit propagandist for new ideas because he was such a good writer. But I disagree. I think he did have original ideas. In fact, you can sort of tell [that] from the degree to which a lot of the other Founders kind of recoil from his thinking.”
Both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton—future Federalists with a disinclination to popular democracy—regarded Paine as extreme. Adams famously wrote his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in response to Paine’s ideas. He wrote in favor of independence but was not comfortable with the hyper-democratic government Paine was proposing.
Paine’s Common Sense was a defining argument for America’s independence from monarchy; Rights of Man extended it to the whole world. Credit: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
The country was still years away from the writing and adoption of the Constitution when these pamphlets were being released, but they did set a foundation for what would eventually go into that document.
“There’s no way Paine knew that he was setting up the mechanism for a constitution,” Rosenfeld says. “But I think in times of disorder and dismay, sometimes a text can articulate clearly the discontent people are feeling. A very similar thing happens at the start of the French Revolution, when What Is the Third Estate?, Abbé Sieyès’s little pamphlet, similarly gives an agenda to people who would go on to be revolutionaries.”
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today. He didn’t want anything like the Senate or the Electoral College, which might act as bulwarks against popular majorities and the will of the people. He wanted judges to be elected by the public. He didn’t want a solo executive but rather something of a committee. While many of the Founders feared what might happen if you gave the people too much power, Paine (like Franklin) did not.
“He really doesn’t come from the aristocratic worlds of people like Hamilton or Madison,” Rosenfeld says. “He’s kind of anti-elitist.”
During the Revolutionary War, Paine was a volunteer for the Continental Army, and he ended up writing The American Crisis about what he was observing. He famously wrote the line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine was essentially cheerleading the war effort and trying to convince his fellow patriots to keep fighting, and that, as difficult as the struggle appeared, it would all be worth it in the end. The American Crisis also found a wide, appreciative, and strategically important readership.
Once the war had concluded, despite his successes and his fame, Paine was broke. He ended up having to argue for compensation from individual states and the newly forming American government. He was eventually awarded $3,000 from Congress for his contributions to the American Revolution.
“He did get some money in the end from Congress, but he wasn’t making it here,” Hogeland says. “He felt he had to leave. And so then he becomes kind of a citizen of the world type.”
Paine was also becoming something of an inventor at this point, pitching an innovative bridge concept to investors and governmental officials, but to no avail. In April of 1787, he decided to take his ideas elsewhere. He returned to Britain, but he failed to raise the investment needed to fully realize his project. He eventually left for France, arriving just as the French Revolution was commencing. Once again, a revolutionary was surrounded by other revolutionaries.
“He goes on to play a pivotal role in the French Revolution,” Rosenfeld says. “He becomes perhaps the first international revolutionary, in that sense.”
Credit: Library of Congress/British Cartoon Prints Collection
In 1791, Paine authored Rights of Man, one of the most influential defenses and manifestos of the Revolution published at that time. Again, he put pen to his democratic impulses and his rejection of monarchy. Again, Paine synthesized ideas that were circulating at the time. On both sides of the Atlantic, he had a preternatural ability to put those ideas into words that resonated with the people. In Britain, Rights of Man sold some 100,000 copies in three months of publication.
“He ends up in France as a hero of the French Revolution, and they wanted him partly because he was a hero of the American Revolution,” Hogeland says. “Paine spoke across France and was even made a member of the revolutionary government.”
As anyone familiar with the French Revolution would suspect, that was not the safest place to be. Paine ended up facing condemnation for opposing the execution of the king: It was wrong, he insisted, and a mistake to turn the king into a martyr. Eventually, like many of his fellow revolutionists, he was arrested and spent ten months in prison. He almost ended up being executed by Robespierre and his lieutenants, but narrowly escaped that fate.
“He barely missed being guillotined himself in France,” Hogeland says. “Because he had such an idiosyncratic personality and such an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world and politics, he was often at odds with allies as well as with enemies.”
The American government didn’t do much of anything to assist Paine in his time of need in France. The U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, did not seem interested in securing Paine’s release from prison or helping him escape the guillotine. Later, after Paine had been released, James Monroe became the minister to France and came to his aid.
With America badly divided over the French Revolution, and the administration of John Adams resolutely set against it and its Jeffersonian allies in the States, Paine didn’t return to the United States until 1802—one year after Jefferson assumed the presidency.
“He thought, ‘Oh, now our guys are in. Now the more democratic people are in,’” Hogeland said. “But he had been writing all this stuff that was so controversial, especially The Age of Reason, which was very anti–organized religion. It became so controversial that even the Jeffersonians thought he was too hot to handle.”
He certainly didn’t return a hero. He still had those who celebrated his work and appreciated his contributions to the country’s independence, but he was now seen as a polarizing figure. Many hated him for his criticisms of organized religion.
New York had granted Paine some land in New Rochelle for his contributions to the American Revolution, so Paine decided to settle there. He continued to write and was a supporter of the Jefferson administration, but his relevance had severely dwindled. Paine died at the age of 72 in 1809. “Very few people came to his funeral, and nobody who was still around from the glory days of 1776 showed up,” Hogeland says.
His reputation, for better and worse, outlived him. Theodore Roosevelt famously called him “a filthy little atheist,” though Paine was in fact a deist. As the 20th century proceeded, however, Paine became a hero to liberals and the left, who found him to be both the most democratic and the most modern of the Founding Fathers.
“His ideas don’t seem that radical to us now, because they’ve become, in a way, our common sense,” Rosenfeld says. “His style and his ideas have become so ordinary to us that it’s hard to actually see that he was advocating for things that were rather radical in their moment, whether it was about race or religion or economics or political rights.”
Today, most of us understand the limits that the Founders placed on the democratic and egalitarian sentiments in our foundational documents. Hogeland pointed out, though, that “in 1776, the anti-democratic, elitist impulse wasn’t the only American impulse. There were radically democratic and populist ideas in play too, and Paine was maybe their most articulate and thoughtful spokesperson.”
You won’t find many statues of Thomas Paine in town squares or abutting county courthouses around the country. It was his ideas, however, that both made this country possible and tilted it, over time, toward the genuine popular democracy we still struggle to create.
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Thor Benson is an independent journalist who has contributed to The American Prospect, Wired, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He’s currently based in Chicago. More by Thor Benson
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
America is suffering a crisis of faith. The president, rapidly losing control of his faculties, is leading a coterie of degenerate cronies, literal malefactors of great wealth, who are destroying whole wings of the White House when they’re not gorging themselves on the public treasury with corrupt contracts and giveaways.
Many Americans, particularly in elite circles, seem stunned and bewildered. The worst people in the country are in power, again, and laying waste to everything. Every week, Trump does something an order of magnitude worse than Watergate, and it’s a two-day story at most. It’s hard to muster the energy to care about so many scandals.
I frankly share the stunned feeling, sometimes. Is a nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump twice worth saving? Maybe the American people deserve to get what they voted for, good and hard.
At those times, I think about Frederick Douglass. There was someone who had a mountain of reasons to give up entirely on the United States. Instead, he poured out a lifetime of grueling effort to end slavery and secure civil rights for African Americans. He lived long enough to see slavery ended, but also to see the resurgence of white supremacy that violently destroyed the brief Reconstruction experiment with multiracial democracy in the South. Yet even with so much of his life’s work in ruins, he never gave up on America or freedom. So how can we?
DOUGLASS’S LIFE STORY SEEMS designed to embody all the contradictions and possibilities of 19th-century America. Born not just a slave, but a mixed-race slave likely fathered by one of his enslavers or one of his enslaver’s sons, he was the product of arguably the single most appalling feature of antebellum slavery: the widespread habit among male Southern slave owners of raping their female slaves and then enslaving their own resulting children.
He successfully escaped bondage from eastern Maryland in 1838, at age 20. After a few years working odd jobs, he was discovered by the abolitionist movement. The discovery of Douglass’s immense oratorical talent was instantly appealing to abolitionist organizers for obvious reasons. He would prove that a Black person can succeed at the highest level, even if he were a result of the dreaded race-mixing, without any formal education, inherited wealth, or powerful family connections. Nobody has ever come closer to the impossible idea of lifting himself by his own bootstraps.
Abolitionists like Douglass toured the northern United States tirelessly, speaking at thousands of abolitionist rallies. This was a dangerous business even in New England, and he was repeatedly the victim of discrimination, heckling, threats, and assaults. One particularly violent brawl left him with a permanently disfigured right hand.
Eventually, he wrote an autobiography, which became an instant classic, and went on extensive international tours. By the mid-1850s, he was a world-famous speaker, writer, journalist, newspaper editor, and all-around celebrity. He ended up being the most-photographed American of the 19th century, and certainly the most important civil rights activist in the world.
In a sense, he was the 19th century’s version of an influencer—except instead of producing short-form video optimized to catch the attention of “masses” of individuals scrolling on their phones, Douglass brought the show to the actual masses, day after day, for decades. Through years of practice, he honed his routine and technique to a mirror finish; a reliable crowd-pleaser was his bitterly sarcastic “Slaveholder’s Sermon,” in which he parodied the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Southern Christianity.
“Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard, horny hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how mercifully he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill!” Douglass had the pastor say to his slaves. “While to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, he has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working” (emphasis in original).
From a modern standpoint, it is almost unbelievable that Douglass could get huge crowds of people, most of whom did not have even a high school education, to pay rapt attention to flowery, hours-long speeches, often full of learned citations and elaborate arguments. But they kept coming back for more. There may be something to the idea that television and cellphones have ruined the national attention span; professor friends of mine relate that if they assign any Douglass speech, it must be heavily abridged or students simply will not read it.
Credit: Southworth & Hawes/Onondaga Historical Association Museum; National Portrait Gallery; George Francis Schreiber/Library of Congress; Library of Congress/Brady-Handy photograph collection.
DOUGLASS’S FIRST MENTOR was William Lloyd Garrison, one of the classic American-style utopian idealists, disgusted by the grubby realities of politics. Garrisonians hated political parties, lambasted the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, advocated pure “moral suasion,” and, as so often with political radicals, were highly prone to sectarian infighting.
After a few years, Douglass came to understand that such a naïve, hyper-moralistic approach—Garrison argued that government itself was essentially always wrong—could never abolish slavery. Abolitionists would have to descend into the political muck and get dirty grappling for power.
Navigating the pitfalls of politics without losing sight of one’s moral principles is always the most difficult part of radicalism, and Douglass managed it with rare dexterity. After having briefly fled the country for fear of prosecution over his involvement with John Brown, Douglass debated the British abolitionist George Thompson in 1860 about whether the Constitution was pro- or anti-slavery. Douglass made the latter case, and while the argument was sophisticated and clever, it was also a little tendentious.
He argued, for instance, that the infamous three-fifths clause was a “downright disability” because it “deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation … Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States.” Mathematically correct, but something of an evasion of how the clause gave extra political power to slave owners in proportion to how many people they owned, and quite obviously done to enlist reverence for the Constitution and the cult of the Founding Fathers on behalf of abolition.
If the argument was something of a cynical expedient in 1860, it became an open-and-shut case when the Radical Republicans added the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. That’s one way to win a debate about constitutional law.
Though he never quite reached the heights of national power, Douglass was not some bit player amid the enormous tumult of the Civil War. When fighting began, Black men were not allowed in the United States military, which Douglass attacked as unjust and counterproductive. “This is no time to fight only with your white hand, and allow your black hand to remain tied,” he argued.
When this ban was removed, thanks partly to his own influence, Douglass became a tireless military recruiter, and two of his own sons enlisted. He quickly stopped, however, when it became clear that Black troops were being abused, paid much less, denied promotions, and, worst of all, denied prisoner-of-war protections, making it more likely for them to be murdered by racist Confederate forces after capture.
Douglass met with President Lincoln in the White House and argued once more that this racist treatment was immoral and holding back the war effort. Lincoln took the complaints seriously, some rules were removed, and Douglass returned to recruiting, though the personal military position he thought was coming never arrived.
Historians have argued that the Civil War was a fairly close-run thing in 1864. Union losses were appalling during the Overland Campaign, as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant went on a sustained, grueling offensive to force the Confederacy into submission and end the war quickly. The resulting carnage and repeated setbacks were extremely unpopular, and Lincoln assumed that unless the tide turned quickly, he was going to lose the election that November. He even met with Douglass to plan a possible effort to covertly free the remaining slaves in the South, should the election be lost.
“Men of Color” recruitment broadside, authored by Frederick Douglass et al., 1863. Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But by this time, there were roughly 200,000 Black men in the United States military, about 10 percent of the total. Without this influx of new recruits, many of whom fought and died in the bloodiest battles of 1864, Grant’s harrying of Lee might have dragged on a critical few months, leading Lincoln to lose the election to would-be Confederate appeaser George B. McClellan. In short, it is entirely possible that without Douglass’s actions to enable and then bolster Black enlistment, the Confederacy would have won its independence.
When African Americans from around the country consecrated a statue of Lincoln in 1876 (known as the Emancipation Statue, it can still be seen in Washington, D.C., today), Douglass delivered a famous oration to practically the entire national political establishment, from President Grant to the Supreme Court to congressional leaders. (As biographer David W. Blight notes, no Black person would do this again until Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.)
There, Douglass delivered a considered political verdict on Lincoln’s legacy. He stated forthrightly that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” and that African Americans “are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” Still, “we were able to take a comprehensive view … and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position … we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglass pointed out that even Lincoln’s prejudice was a necessary precondition for his political success. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Few have delivered a better summary of how to ride the edge of the politically possible.
The North Star, founded by Frederick Douglass, merged with the Liberty Party Paper of Syracuse and was renamed the Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
DOUGLASS’S MOST MARKED CHARACTERISTIC was his astounding capacity for empathy. Brilliant minds are not uncommon. Much rarer is the genius with a sound moral sense—one which persists even when that person has suffered terrible injustice. Someone with Douglass’s background would have had every right to cultivate a bilious resentment against white people. But a repeated theme in his anti-slavery work was how the institution gravely harmed everyone, regardless of race.
This extended even to his unknown father. “Cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so,” Douglass wrote in his first autobiography. “Unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.”
No doubt this was partly rhetorical—by demonstrating insight into the human motivations even of his own brutal enslaver, Douglass demonstrated his own humanity, and his superior virtue to boot—but it was also true.
Douglass maintained this largeness of spirit throughout his life. He was one of a handful of men—and the only Black person of any gender—at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights conference in American history. There he argued strongly for women’s suffrage against more moderate factions who worried it would discredit the group, and he helped carry the day. He continued to advocate for women’s rights his whole life, even as many white feminists, embittered by the fact that Black men had gotten the vote first, and drawn into the vortex of racism that gradually consumed the post–Civil War North, welcomed segregation and Jim Crow.
“Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote,” Douglass said in an 1888 speech at an International Council of Women conference. “They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.”
In 1867, as a xenophobic anti-Chinese panic built up, Douglass argued powerfully that the United States is a “composite nation,” and Chinese immigrants should be welcomed and granted all the benefits of citizenship. “There are such things in the world as human rights,” he said. Later, he strenuously opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Douglass was, of course, far from perfect. He was vain, egotistical, proud, touchy (particularly about racial slights), and treated his first wife quite poorly. He ended up, somewhat by accident, as the patriarch of an enormous family and coterie of hangers-on, and was forced to keep an arduous touring schedule long into his old age to make ends meet. He took over the Freedman’s Savings Bank just a few months before it collapsed, perhaps unwittingly persuading Black depositors to open accounts that were almost immediately wiped out.
Such flaws were hardly surprising in a man of his time and background. On the contrary, it is surprising that they weren’t much worse. A man who endured such a traumatic upbringing and then found his way into so much privilege could be expected to develop a severe case of megalomania, if not substance abuse. That he did not is certainly partly the result of his own noble character, but I think also because Douglass had a great moral crusade for which to fight. Struggle against injustice can give one’s life a powerful sense of purpose.
That same purpose exists today, as white supremacists once more have the upper hand. Pete Hegseth is resegregating the military, and the Republican Party is rebuilding a new Jim Crow, enabled by the Supreme Court. Just as in Douglass’s day, the voting rights of Black people in the South are being stolen by force and fraud.
In 1878, as Reconstruction was being destroyed, Douglass gave a speech remembering what the Civil War was about. “Though freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South, and, the party of slavery is now in the ascendant, we need bate no jot of heart or hope,” he said. “The heart of the nation is still sound and strong, and as in the past, so in the future, patriotic millions, with able captains to lead them, will stand as a wall of fire around the Republic, and in the end see Liberty, Equality, and Justice triumphant.”
Douglass made such a political prophecy come true in his own time, and we can do the same again.
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Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
“Iam no theorist,” Louis Brandeis stated bluntly in the Hastings, Nebraska, Daily Republican on February 3, 1912. “I have had a large experience and I know what I am talking about.”
It’s rare to unearth a quote that gives you the full measure of a man, especially someone as varied in his interests as Brandeis. His biographer, historian Melvin Urofsky, segments his life into four careers: attorney, Progressive reformer, Zionist (out of nowhere as he approached the age of 60), and Supreme Court justice. He practically invented the concept of pro bono legal work; he revolutionized operations in the insurance, railroad, utility, and textile industries; he was a leading critic of Gilded Age monopoly trusts and the financial machinery behind them; he inspired and substantially wrote Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” economic agenda; and his landmark dissents on free speech and the right to privacy eventually became the prevailing standard in American law. But throughout all of this, Brandeis relied upon what he could see—often barely, as he had such vision trouble that fellow students had to read to him at Harvard Law so he could keep up with the workload—with his own two eyes.
Brandeis’s upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, where his family traded grain, gave him insight into how honest businesses and farmers could achieve economic freedom. The family business was liquidated before the Panic of 1873 sent the country into a deep recession, seeding his distrust of financial engineering. His early career as a corporate lawyer taught him how well-meaning regulation could be defeated with armies of loophole hunters. He often won reforms by learning more about corporate titans’ businesses than even they knew. And his major contribution to America’s courtrooms, the Brandeis brief, was nothing more than a recitation of facts as a basis for applying law. “He called the Brandeis brief ‘what any fool knows,’” said Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University law professor and author of Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet.
The radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.
A statue on the campus of the university outside Boston that bears his name includes a quote Brandeis delivered in a dissent in Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan (1924), a case about regulation of standard bread weights in Nebraska that feels trivial for such a definitive proclamation: “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.” The line before that in the dissent is even more on point: “Knowledge is essential to understanding, and understanding should precede judging.”
The knowledge in that instance, which Brandeis laboriously chronicled with legislative testimony, World War I Food Administration reports, and excerpts from the trade publication Bakers Weekly, involved the schemes for “short-weighting” bread loaves by a few ounces to overcharge unsuspecting customers, the numerous ways state and federal regulators had sought to outlaw such villainy, and why scrupulous bread makers suffered no appreciable cost from the rules, and indeed were relieved of the chore of “constantly watching the juggling of weight by their competitors” rather than producing quality products at a fair price.
Brandeis was as concerned with the realities of breadmaking as he was with any realities, but this recounting had a point: to admonish the Court for substituting their own judgment about the burdens of regulations over that of officials elected by the people. This offended him as “an exercise of the powers of a super-legislature—not the performance of the constitutional function of judicial review.”
Sound familiar?
AMERICA AT ITS BIRTH REBELLED at the centralized nature of the British Empire and embraced—at least rhetorically—a new form of political organization, where artisans and farmers and small merchants could exercise self-governance, take charge of their own lives, and reach their full potential. Brandeis, with his faith in democracy and trust in the people, was an heir to this tradition and to one Founder’s vision in particular. “I see him as the Jewish Jefferson,” said Rosen, who somewhat amazingly studied under one of Brandeis’s last law clerks, David Riesman.
Even Brandeis’s Zionism, a surprise given that he was never a practicing Jew, was more about building a model society than religiously inspired. He imagined a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a small-unit, agrarian collection of kibbutzim, removed from the social discord that industrialization had brought to Gilded Age America. In his naïveté, he declared that the economic benefits of this organization would bring the two peoples together. “I don’t think he would be very happy with Israel now,” Urofsky told me.
Portraits of Brandeis as a younger man (left) and as a Supreme Court justice. Credit: Library of Congress/George Grantham Bain Collection; Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress
As a young attorney in Boston, Brandeis merged his Jeffersonianism with relentless practicality. He was hired to resolve a shoe manufacturer’s labor dispute: He ended up restructuring the regional shoe business so workers received more consistent pay. When the Boston Consolidated Gas Co. formed a monopoly, Brandeis proposed a “sliding scale” plan where the company’s dividend could only increase if it lowered prices for customers. He proved that railroads could save $1 million a day through scientific management—reorganizing their repair shops, more efficiently laying track—which regulators used as justification for lowering rates. When insurance policyholders hired Brandeis to protect them from the abuses of term life companies, which funneled 40 cents out of every dollar in premiums to executive salaries, agent commissions, and shareholder dividends, he came up with having savings banks sell the product, which drove commercial insurance prices down through competition.
“A lot of reformers complained about things,” Urofsky explained. “But once Brandeis identified a problem he came up with a solution.”
In working out these compromises, Brandeis referred to himself as “counsel to the situation.” In exchange, he asked for no money, which burnished his reputation as The People’s Lawyer. He could work pro bono because his law firm was extraordinarily lucrative; his partner’s family owned a successful paper mill and became the firm’s first client. Attending to the needs of the public was kind of Brandeis’s hobby. “I don’t want money or property most,” he said once to an interviewer. “I want to be free.”
This experience also gave him understanding of how even careful compromises could falter. “He thought that as an attorney … he could work out contractual relations that were mutually satisfying across the gulf of power,” said Gerald Berk, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon and another Brandeis biographer. “And then he realized, ‘Wait a minute. These guys will abuse this power.’”
This understanding sparked Brandeis’s antipathy toward any unchecked ability to impose conditions over man. “He is somebody who was extraordinarily consistent about his skepticism of concentrated power, regardless of whether it was coming from the commercial sector or from government,” said Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Indeed, in his crackdown on fraudulent life insurance, a reform he considered the crowning accomplishment of his life, he countered with a private bank option, not a public option.
This would prove uncomfortable to liberals when the Democratic hero voted to strike down a few New Deal programs on the Supreme Court. But big government wasn’t really a feature of pre–New Deal America; the radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.
Source: Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department/Brandeis University Library
IN “A CURSE OF BIGNESS” and a series of articles in Harper’s that were collected into the book Other People’s Money—and How the Bankers Use It, Brandeis wrote his briefs against corporate power. He considered consolidated trusts too big to manage; it was impossible for their leaders to track so many divisions. They were inherently corrupting, with their boards populated with the same self-interested insiders (he termed them “interlocking directorates”). They suppressed innovation and rejected internal improvements, making them inefficient by temperament and design, the precise opposite of the beliefs held by Robert Bork, the right-wing legal scholar who reversed much of Brandeis’s theories about competition policy in the 1970s.
The trusts were constructed and controlled by financiers with no experience in the trusts’ particular businesses, but much expertise in controlling capital to advantage themselves. Brandeis warned of a financial oligarchy that never took on risk, instead using borrowed cash to build lucrative empires that threatened the nation’s stability. Despite its thunderous reputation, Other People’s Money is mostly laden with dense regurgitations of valuations, shares of stock, and bank deposits. Yet the vigor of his pursuit suggested that Brandeis found the financiers behind monopoly even more distasteful than the monopolies themselves.
But financial control isn’t Brandeis’s primary complaint about bigness. He believed that those robbed of the ability to start their own business or purchase what they please were harmed as citizens, too. “Brandeis stands for the idea that economic independence is a fundamental condition for democratic freedom,” said Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School. There’s no record of him uttering the famous line attributed to him—that we can have a democratic society or concentration of wealth, but not both—yet he would agree with its essence.
He did say another line that speaks to his belief in how facts can change the world: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
The confrontation that elevated Brandeis as a national icon concerned the New Haven Railroad, which was in the process of rolling up all the rail lines in New England, using a fake subsidiary to purchase the stock of the last holdout, the Boston & Maine. J.P. Morgan was the New Haven’s financial patron, and thanks to its 8 percent stock dividend, practically every businessman in Boston was its champion. But Brandeis, who paid his own firm $25,000 so he could freely work on the matter, pored over the New Haven’s books and found significant financial strain that he said threatened the company’s operations and its dividend.
This outraged the city’s financial elite, who were all heavily invested in the New Haven. They claimed Brandeis was misinformed and driven by anti-bigness monomania. But though the Massachusetts legislature approved the merger in 1909, math was on Brandeis’s side. The New Haven was indeed in terrible financial shape. As stock transfers made middlemen millions, the railroad deteriorated, with a series of deadly crashes attributed to deficient maintenance. The company’s books were riddled with phony accounting. In time, the feds broke up the New Haven, the dividend was eliminated, and railway president Charles Sanger Mellen was ousted. It’s now part of Amtrak.
The 1912 election was described in Matt Stoller’s Goliath as a crossroads for how the nation would wrest democracy back from the frightening business dominance that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. President William Howard Taft, running for re-election, wanted to use existing tools of trust-busting, which were limited by the courts; former President Theodore Roosevelt, who broke from his handpicked successor and founded the Bull Moose Party, believed monopolies were inevitable but could be regulated into becoming benign.
Brandeis backed Woodrow Wilson, someone he had never spoken to until after Wilson clinched the Democratic nomination. After Brandeis wrote one congratulatory letter, Wilson summoned him to his summer cottage in Sea Girt, New Jersey, and they hammered out an entire economic platform over a three-hour working lunch. The program was Jeffersonian where Roosevelt’s was Hamiltonian, regulating not companies but competition by outlawing unfair methods like forced sales, contractual restraints, or price discrimination. It fit Brandeis’s small-government approach, and he thought it would free citizens to pursue their talents. “They believed good people should be given the opportunity to succeed, and if it was opposed by large corporations, that block should be taken away,” Urofsky said.
His insistent refusal of pay for legal work on Progressive reforms gave Brandeis the nickname “The People’s Lawyer.” Credit: Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department/Brandeis University Library
The country gave their votes to Wilson. While considered too controversial for the cabinet, Brandeis stage-managed a legislative burst that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the constitutional amendment allowing an income tax, and two anti-monopoly laws, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. The former secured prohibitions on unfair practices while allowing the government to challenge mergers that “substantially lessen competition,” rather than just ones that create a monopoly. The FTC could study markets to identify new tactics and prevent consolidation before it formed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the public figure who most closely took on Brandeis’s role as counsel to the situation before entering public office, drew on his approach to government when devising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The whole point of the CFPB was not new substantive rules, a new rule declaring overdrafts illegal, but instead to change the structure so there was countervailing power to the financial predators,” she said.
The New Freedom was not wholly successful. Despite efforts to decentralize the new central bank, the same lords of finance would come to dominate it. Brandeis disliked the selections for FTC commissioners. And Wilson’s attention drifted amid the Great War and his failing health. It took the Great Depression for the country’s political elite to recognize Brandeis’s warnings. Franklin Roosevelt would eventually institute plans like the separation of commercial and investment banking and the Securities Exchange Act to outlaw stock fraud, which appeared plucked directly from Other People’s Money. (Brandeis reissued the book after the 1929 crash.)
The New Deal, then, delivered on the promise of the New Freedom, and its structure of regulated competition sustained America’s unprecedented shared prosperity in the decades following World War II.
SUCH WAS HIS IMPACT as a private citizen that Brandeis’s Supreme Court career can be addressed as almost an afterthought. The 1916 nomination fight itself, which occasioned a horror among the business class that is today reserved for Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, was among its most interesting elements. A cartoon from the era showed “Privilege,” “Wall Street,” and “Monopoly” writhing in pain while Brandeis strolls along. At one point, a petition of 55 prominent Boston Brahmins opposing the nomination was circulated, whereupon a lawyer in Brandeis’s office fashioned a chart of all their overlapping financial connections. It was supposed to run in The New Republic, then a house organ for Brandeis allies. “The editor killed it. The owner’s friends and business connections were being called out,” Rosen explained.
Moneyed interests despaired at Brandeis’s ascension to the Supreme Court. Credit: Nelson Greene/Library of Congress
Brandeis sat from 1916 to 1939 on a Lochner-lite Court, repeatedly outvoted by conservatives until FDR appointees joined him during his final years on the bench. Yet he believed in the power of dissent to illuminate reason in the minds of men. And he used his familiar blend of facts, animated by America’s principles of individual liberty, to establish a legacy that would eventually convince a nation.
In Whitney v. California (1927), the Court supported punishment for a woman who organized the state’s Communist Labor Party, alleged to be a violent criminal syndicate. Brandeis concurred on technical grounds, but used the case to argue for free speech as a cornerstone of democracy. “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties,” he wrote. “They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
People must be allowed to hear all sides of the debate, because that is how ideas develop and the national character builds, Brandeis believed. Anything less is arbitrary coercion that breeds repression and hate. “I think Brandeis had very well-developed ideas about citizenship,” said Tim Wu, the former Biden administration competition policy czar who borrowed Brandeis’s title The Curse of Bigness for one of his own books. “The U.S. was meant to be a republic of citizens and not a republic of observers or passive followers.”
The greater assault on liberty came from new technology. Brandeis found Prohibition unworkable precisely because of the police powers it would take to enforce it. A Seattle policeman named Roy Olmstead ran a bootlegging operation, and federal agents got the evidence needed to indict him by tapping the phone wires outside his office and listening in on his conversations. They never actually entered Olmstead’s premises, ruled Taft, promoted to chief justice after his failed re-election, and therefore there was no Fourth Amendment violation.
The broader point Brandeis made was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone.
In his dissent, “Brandeis insists on preserving the same amount of privacy in the age of wires as the age of the horse and buggy,” Rosen said. He wanted government kept at the electronic water’s edge, the same way it’s kept outside the home. He also wanted to incorporate in the dissent a new technology he thought would be truly privacy-depriving in 1928: television. But untutored in its operation, he mistakenly believed that those on-screen could see and hear those watching at home. In this, Rosen quipped, he anticipated Zoom.
The broader point Brandeis made in Olmstead was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone. If you were compelled to give up your thoughts and beliefs, your freedom to think would be extinguished, the greatest crime of tyrants. “He really believes in the individual conscience and the capacity and ability of people to engage in moral reflection, and that we should support laws and structures to encourage that capacity,” Teachout said. “There is a force in our internal thought processes that actually shapes the world.”
The right to privacy was affirmed by the Warren Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, as was Brandeis’s conception of free speech that should only be abridged to avert serious injury. At a time when constitutional protections—like the right to make private medical decisions with your doctor—are being knocked down by the Roberts Court, Brandeis’s dissents demonstrate to Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson that there is power in building an argument with care and precision, utilizing the facts that surround, that can meaningfully oppose. One day, the nation might just agree with you.
WE ARE TODAY LIVING in the world Brandeis feared. The rule by the one percent, the fusion of big government and big business, the domination of public knowledge by Big Tech and AI platforms, the surveillance economy—the fever dreams of the past are now present, and worse than had been imagined. “Government itself has been weaponized on behalf of the wealthiest,” Sen. Warren told me. “And that means democracy as a tool is under threat in a way that Brandeis didn’t have to confront.”
Chief Justice William Howard Taft (left) had a conservative majority, but Brandeis’s dissents would eventually become the legal standard. Credit: AP Photo
When a new strain of anti-monopolists who rebelled against the laissez-faire attitudes of the past 40 years sought to give themselves a name, they chose the New Brandeis movement. While I may have been the first to publish that nickname, it was not my invention. But in reviewing Brandeis’s life and work, it fits. Anti-monopolists follow in the American traditions of skepticism toward concentrated power and a desire for human freedom. And like Brandeis, they believe that personal self-governance is necessary for political self-governance.
“He always said that the most important thing a person can be in a democracy was a citizen,” Urofsky said. “As a citizen you not only reap rewards of democracy but have a responsibility to it.”
The epitome of a citizen in Brandeis’s preferred democracy may be his own great-grandson, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. He leads the Interfaith Alliance, founded to countervail the power of the religious right and Christian nationalism, and more recently supporting faith leaders who are working to shield their neighbors from ICE. “We are saying religion can be the handmaiden to authoritarianism but also its worst enemy,” he told me.
This work has associations with Raushenbush’s other great-grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, a leader of the Social Gospel anti-poverty movement of the late 19th century. Brandeis’s daughter Elizabeth married Rauschenbusch’s son Paul in 1925, and the two became leading economists at the University of Wisconsin who authored the first state unemployment compensation law in the nation. Brandeis would successfully lobby FDR for an unemployment insurance component to the Social Security Act of 1935. The late philosopher Richard Rorty was Paul Raushenbush’s cousin.
“This is the vibe,” Raushenbush said.
He talked about Brandeis’s austere summer home on Cape Cod, still owned by the family today, where the mattresses were made of horsehair and a TV had to be rented to watch the political conventions. And he talked about Brandeis’s commitment to serving the people, armed with the facts and common wisdom. He related it to Walter Rauschenbusch, at his church in the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, wondering how the Gospel can uplift a congregation in penury, and his grandparents, in their office in Madison, wondering how someone copes with no job prospects, and how government can help.
“There’s a theme here that is relevant to our lives,” he said. “How am I going to use my skills to impact and love my neighbor?”
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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
For a brief time during the Progressive Era, Ida M. Tarbell was the most famous woman in America. It was 1901 and the McClure’s Magazine journalist had recently published a much-loved, yearlong, 20-part series on Abraham Lincoln, for which she had traveled cross-country, uncovered new material, and put the publication solidly in the black at last. It was the first time since Samuel Sidney McClure launched his magazine in 1893 that it wasn’t struggling on the brink of bankruptcy. Tarbell’s Lincoln series doubled its circulation, and the newsroom could finally exhale, at least for a moment.
At 43 years old, Tarbell was living the life she wanted. She had a comfortable apartment in New York City, a career with purpose, no domestic responsibilities beyond her two cats, a wide circle of international friends, and colleagues who appreciated both her and her work.
But ghosts of the Gilded Age were haunting America, and now that McClure’s had solid financial footing, it was racing to catch up. Competitors were already breaking news on corporate trusts, which outraged Americans exhausted and infuriated by the conditions that had plunged the country into extreme inequality.
As the senior staff writer and by all accounts McClure’s best friend, it was on Tarbell to undertake this next great investigation. One colleague suggested a story about the sugar monopoly. Another suggested Philip Danforth Armour, the meatpacking monopolist who used “everything but the squeal.” Those ideas were swiftly sidelined when oilmen in Spindletop, Texas, hit a gusher so powerful on January 10, 1901, that it is now credited as the genesis of the Texas oil boom, not to mention Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco. Spindletop shot a black geyser 200 feet into the air and produced 70,000 barrels daily; in just months, the tiny nearby town of Beaumont grew five and a half times, to 50,000 people who wanted to get rich off the black gold.
So the newsroom ditched squeal and sugar for oil, specifically the oil of John D. Rockefeller. His Standard Oil Company controlled the vast majority of the nation’s oil production, an undeniable monopoly. For Miss Tarbell, as her colleagues called her, the assignment made her queasy. After all, Rockefeller had ruined her father.
IDA MINERVA TARBELL WAS BORN on November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania, to Franklin Sumner Tarbell and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell. The three lived in a log house full of “joyous interests,” delicious food, and a big fireplace. In 1860, the family moved 40 miles away to Titusville, where Franklin believed he was the one who could build the tank that could hold the hundreds of barrels of oil bubbling up from a new well.
The Tarbells lived in a shanty so grim that Ida, then a toddler, announced one day that she was going back to their old home, only to return an hour later, solemnly telling her mother that she did not know the way there. The episode must have instilled some sense of permission to investigate that carried into Ida’s career. “I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was to be accepted,” she wrote. “My mother always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions asked.”
Tarbell was concerned with understanding not just how the world worked, but for whom.
The benefits of the oil boom were imperceptible to Ida as a child, she later wrote. But she recognized the horrors. On April 17, 1861, her father and his friends were excited to hear news that a man who had been drilling deeper than others had struck a new oil vein. As they ran toward the well, a massive explosion rocked the very earth. “A careless light had ignited the gas which had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in the vicinity,” Tarbell wrote. Nineteen men burned to death. The horror did not end there that night. After dark, a man “burned and swollen beyond recognition” turned up at the shanty doorstep, and the family took him in and nursed him back to health. In another instance, a neighboring woman was hurrying to start a fire in her stove and poured oil on the wood, Tarbell recalled. The woman and two others who ran to her aid “were burned to a crisp.”
The tragedy was tangible, she wrote, not a mystery from beyond. “What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in handling either crude or refined oil,” Tarbell wrote of the dead women. “I heard horrified whisperings about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for nights.” Tarbell suffered nightmares for the rest of her life.
Such events would have been enough to turn a person against the architects of the industry that caused them. But Big Oil had not finished with Tarbell’s education just yet. For three months in 1872, when Tarbell was a teenager, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company went on a spree of coerced corporate takeovers, buying out 22 of 26 rival refineries at bargain-basement prices in what later became known as the Cleveland Massacre. The independent companies sold because Rockefeller told them of a powerful alliance between bigger oil drillers and railroads. A few months before, Pennsylvania Railroad President Tom Scott had indeed formed a secret alliance called the South Improvement Company. The South Improvement partners wanted to stop competition between refiners so they could raise the cost of transporting the oil by freight. Under the secret agreement, the railroads would increase their prices beyond what operators like Tarbell’s father could pay and then give some of their proceeds to Rockefeller, a form of payment they termed a “rebate”—but “kickback” and “bribe” work, too. That was enough to scare the small-businessmen into selling their companies for cheap.
When the news leaked to newspapers across Pennsylvania’s oil region, oilmen like Tarbell’s father were incensed. They ran into the street, she wrote in her History of the Standard Oil Company. “Nobody waited to find out his neighbor’s opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was ‘conspiracy.’ For weeks the whole body of oil men abandoned regular business and surged from town to town intent on destroying the ‘Monster,’ the ‘Forty Thieves,’ the ‘great Anaconda,’ as they called the mysterious South Improvement Company.”
Rockefeller scoffed at talk of a conspiracy; it didn’t matter much to his monopolistic project, wrote biographer Ron Chernow in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Once he had the Cleveland refineries, “he then marched on and did the same thing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and the other refining centers.”
Among those ruined was Tarbell’s father. “A big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future,” she wrote. It was akin to a “blow between the eyes.” She was 15.
THAT WAS THE BACKGROUND AGAINST which Tarbell considered her new assignment as a reporter at the height of her career. Yet she was no longer a teenager and had passed the recent decades with the same explorer’s spirit her mother had encouraged in Pennsylvania.
She wrote and thought from a worldly perspective. She was concerned with understanding not just how the world worked, but for whom. She had attended college, the only woman in her class, and originally sought a career as a scientist. She had flirted with men, and she flirted with at least one woman when she lived in Paris, where she supported herself as a writer and gathered an international set of friends, men and women alike. She produced a biography of Madame Marie-Jeanne Roland, a French revolutionary put to death by guillotine, and another of Napoleon Bonaparte. She had reshaped the nation’s view of Abraham Lincoln through her cross-country reporting, showing him as a “bright, rather handsome” striver, as one Chicago reader put it, not the unkempt, backwoods lowborn of conventional wisdom at the time.
With the goodwill and trust of her readers, Tarbell began to hunt Standard Oil just as President Theodore Roosevelt was, but with greater stealth and truer aim. In December 1901, almost a year after the Spindletop gusher blew, Roosevelt used his State of the Union address to tell lawmakers they must use their power to curb monopolies. They did not until well after McClure’s began publishing Tarbell’s exposés the following November.
Already, The Atlantic had published articles about Rockefeller’s monopoly in a series titled “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” Tarbell decided she would go deeper. She excavated the numerous legal cases the company had fielded since 1870, unearthing similarities and connections between all the disparate records of evidence and sworn testimony—a feat of research unassisted by digital tools—all illustrating rampant corruption, including that Rockefeller had colluded with the rail industry. She interviewed numerous sources in preparation for an interview with Rockefeller himself, and she began to encounter warning after warning, from other reporters and even her father, all of whom said Rockefeller would ruin her if she found out too much. Tarbell parried with Rockefeller’s corporate flack, Henry Huttleston Rogers, a man whose nickname was “Hell Hound,” who tried and failed to intimidate her, and so, finally, just froze her out of an interview with Rockefeller. She adjusted, using the same technique she’d used writing about Lincoln, reviewing documents, interviewing all the people around him, including Rockefeller’s estranged brother, Frank, a figure she found sad.
Standard Oil was an undisputed giant before Tarbell’s 1904 series, which triggered legal action that broke up the company. Credit: Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress
Yet she could not deny that Rockefeller had also put his considerable wealth toward public health, toward the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, Harvard, and what is now Spelman College, and funded a clinic for poor women and numerous other philanthropic ventures. She was committed to showing those facts, too, writing not just invective against the man who bankrupted her father but showing a human simultaneously capable of generosity and cruelty.
Chapter 17 of The History of the Standard Oil Company is titled “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company,” and notes that the privileges of securing a practical monopoly “alone will not account for its success. Something besides illegal advantages has gone into the making of the Standard Oil Trust,” and though it is now “blackened by commercial sin, has always been strong in all great business qualities—in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness. It has always been rich in youth as well as greed, in brains as well as unscrupulousness.” In our era of cynical both-sides journalism, Tarbell’s brand did not hold all things equal. Rather, she acknowledged that they existed. That was an ethic that marked her writing throughout her career: the desire to separate fact from fiction, real wisdom from conventional wisdom. She employed a distinctly different approach than the one of mainstream journalists today, who often attempt to act as ciphers through which events must pass on their way to the page (or website).
Tarbell finished her series in October 1904 and collected the articles into a book published the same year. By then, Standard Oil controlled all but 9 percent of the country’s oil production, but still it took another year for Roosevelt to order the Justice Department to investigate Rockefeller’s trust. In 1906, the department sued Standard for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law previously used to punish labor unions because courts ruled that strikes and boycotts hurt trade. Three years later, a federal circuit court agreed, and so did the Supreme Court in 1911. The decision forced Rockefeller to break Standard into 34 geographically separate companies that would compete with one another. None of that would have happened without Tarbell’s reporting, historians say, and it was her articles that historian Nancy C. Unger, professor emerita of history at Santa Clara University, says were responsible for the Hepburn Act of 1906, which expanded the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which further strengthened the ICC; the creation of the Federal Trade Commission; and the Clayton Trust Act of 1914, the law that “really puts teeth” into the Antitrust Act, Unger told me.
Tarbell was at once objective and impassioned, as the following paragraph that Unger highlighted makes clear:
“No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way,” Tarbell wrote. “If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days.”
“To have that kind of animus and still produce a balanced, compelling, evidence-based indictment, I think that’s hard to do,” Unger said. “It’s hard not to let your anger and resentment color things and run away with it, and she did a really admirable job of saying, ‘I have to go and see where the evidence takes me.’”
For biographer Kathleen Brady, author of Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, the details that stood out to her while researching the godmother of modern investigation were the ones that showed Tarbell to be a woman making her way in an inhospitable world, at times traveling alone and outside of the sphere of acceptable womanly activity. Brady’s research showed that Tarbell expected she would prove that John D. Rockefeller was simply a better businessman than most of the people that she knew, including her beloved father, Brady told me. “But there was more to the story, and we live in a completely different world now because the Supreme Court in 1911 broke up Standard Oil.”
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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish
“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”
~ Martha Graham
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer, teacher and choreographer responsible for creating the Graham technique. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. Wikipedia
Gaia Premiered Jan 25, 2025 #Gaia Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Lynne McTaggart takes you on a profound journey into the science and practice of collective intention, uncovering how it generates an energetic field capable of transforming reality. Join our live, global Peace Intention Experiment with Lynne McTaggart Feb. 1, 2025 – https://cs-link.gaia.com/Power-Intention
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 1, 2026 Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic/mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. Her website is www.kamlak.com. Here she describes a very brief, yet important, episode in the history of esoteric culture. In Bohemia, during the early years of the seventeenth century, there existed for about twenty years a tolerant mixture of alchemists, kabbalists, Muslim scholars, Catholics, hermeticists, protestants, philosophers, and troubadours. It was a continuation of humanity’s authentic, life-giving tradition. While it ended with the beginning of the Thirty Years War, it also was a seed for the German Romantic movement. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “Parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Thursday, February 27, 2021)
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