03. She showed conclusively the connection between
transportation and monopoly in the oil industry, revealing the mastery
of the tools of transportation, by rebates, by control of tank cars, or
by pipe lines, that had enabled John D. Rockefeller to establish his
great trust. She showed also the unlovely methods of competition, long
common to all business, but magnified by their use in the hands of a
monopoly to establish itself. "What we are witnessing," wrote Washington
Gladden a little later, "is a new apocalypse, an uncovering of the
iniquity of the land.... We have found that no society can march
hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled
individualism."

Three years before Miss Tarbell displayed the tendency of the trusts,
President Hadley, of Yale, had suggested that social ostracism, or
social stigma, might be made an efficient tool for reform. Other writers
used the tool. Lincoln Steffens, in a series of articles on "The Shame
of the Cities," exposed the connection between graft and politics.
Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of
society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." _Collier's Weekly_ undertook
to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines.
Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their
work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they
portrayed. _Coniston_, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control
of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ to
expose the meat-packers.

A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed
of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city
journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers,
and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before.
The range of the daily paper was, however, limited by a few hundred
miles, and its influence could not become national. A new periodical
literature, resembling the old literary monthlies, but using many timely
and journalistic articles, sprang into life and gained national
circulation and influence. S.S. McClure was one of its pioneers.
_Everybody's_, the _Cosmopolitan_, _Munsey's_, the _American_, and
weeklies like _Collier's_, the _Outlook_, and the _Independent_ were
among the journals that helped to spread the conclusions and advocate
reforms. Besides these a horde of imitators fattened for a time upon
exposure.

Jour