# The Life of Elbert H. Gary ***The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel*** (Appleton, 1925) is [[Ida Tarbell]]'s **sympathetic** biography of [[Elbert Gary]], the founding chairman of [[U.S. Steel]] — a book that marks how far Tarbell had traveled from the trust-busting reporter of two decades earlier. Where *[[The History of the Standard Oil Company]]* had prosecuted a monopolist, this book largely **praised** a steel-trust executive, presenting Gary as a constructive corporate statesman who stabilized a chaotic industry. Tarbell glossed lightly over the harder facts of his record — the price-coordinating "Gary Dinners" and his hardline opposition to organized labor during the 1919 Steel Strike. ## Relevance to the Right-Wing KB The book is the documentary evidence for Tarbell's **late-career drift from muckraker to corporate chronicler** — a turn that complicates any tidy reading of her as a permanent adversary of concentrated wealth. For the KB it is a useful reminder that even the era's most celebrated accountability journalist could be brought around to a friendly portrait of big business, and that the muckraking impulse was not a fixed ideological commitment. It pairs instructively with her Standard Oil work as the before-and-after of a single career. ## See Also - [[Ida Tarbell]] - [[Elbert Gary]] - [[U.S. Steel]] - [[The History of the Standard Oil Company]]