“In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make,” Ida Tarbell wrote in her autobiography. “He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man.”

The enterprising journalist’s observation was not abstract. It was shaped during her childhood in postbellum Pennsylvania’s Oil Valley, where she saw the rise of a monopoly engorged with the labor of working people.

At home, she witnessed her oil refiner father humiliated by John D. Rockefeller’s South Improvement Company, a clandestine railroad cartel that fixed shipping rates behind closed doors. Yet Tarbell also witnessed something else: collective resistance. Her community dragged these hidden abuses into the light, organizing anti-monopolist meetings, staging boycotts, and petitioning lawmakers to rein in corporate abuse.