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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Rising of the Tide," Ida M. Tarbell explores the tumultuous currents of social and economic change during the Progressive Era. Combining her journalism expertise with evocative prose, Tarbell delves into the intricacies of American industry and its impact on society, particularly focusing on the oil industry's rise and its implications for ordinary citizens. The book is marked by a keen sense of historical context, reflecting Tarbell's own experiences as she navigates the intersection of capitalism and morality, making a compelling argument for social reform and accountability. Ida M. Tarbell, a pioneering investigative journalist and a key figure in the women's suffrage movement, brought a unique perspective to her writing. Her deep-seated commitment to uncovering corruption and her firsthand knowledge of the oil industry's practices stemmed from her upbringing in a family affected by the monopolistic practices of Standard Oil. Tarbell's journalistic integrity, combined with her passionate advocacy for social justice, serves as the backbone of this compelling work. "The Rising of the Tide" is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the roots of modern American capitalism and the everlasting relevance of ethics in business. Tarbell's insightful analysis and stirring narrative style provide readers with both a historical account and a moral compass, making this text invaluable for scholars, historians, and modern-day activists alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Rising of the Tide
Table of Contents
Introduction
A community’s conscience is tested as the swell of public change gathers force and presses against the boundaries of private life.
The Rising of the Tide by Ida M. Tarbell arrives from a writer best known for her investigative rigor and civic-minded insight, offering a narrative shaped by the concerns of early twentieth-century America. While Tarbell’s reputation was forged in journalism, this book turns that attentiveness toward the rhythms of everyday life and the pressures that history exerts on ordinary people. Set in an American town during a period of mounting social transformation, it traces how national conversations seep into streets, homes, and halls, rendering public issues immediate and personal. The result is a socially attuned, reflective reading experience.
The premise is simple yet expansive: a town encounters the rising currents of change and must sort out what kind of community it wishes to be. As institutions, workplaces, and parlors become forums for debate, neighbors negotiate duty, belonging, and the obligations they owe one another. Tarbell’s storytelling favors close observation and calm appraisal over melodrama, allowing tension to accrue through conversations, decisions, and the slow reordering of habits. Readers can expect a voice that is steady and humane, a style that values clarity, and a mood that remains serious without losing sympathy for the complexities of human motives.
Tarbell brings enduring questions to the forefront: How should a community balance individual liberty and common responsibility? What do fairness and probity mean when public stakes are high? Where do private loyalties and public obligations intersect, and who draws the line? The book shines a light on civic ethics, the formation of public opinion, and the subtle ways social forces shape personal choice. It also considers how prosperity, work, and reputation are entangled with the fabric of local life. These themes resonate beyond any single moment, inviting readers to reflect on the foundations of trust and the practice of citizenship.
Stylistically, the book bears the imprint of its author’s investigative discipline. Scenes are built with an eye for process—how meetings proceed, how decisions are made, and how consensus hardens or dissolves. Tarbell’s prose is lucid and measured, attentive to the texture of speech and the weight of facts without losing the pulse of feeling. The storytelling favors cumulative insight: small details cohere into a portrait of a town learning what it believes. Readers who value socially observant narratives will find a voice that neither scolds nor sensationalizes, but rather invites careful consideration of evidence, motives, and consequences.
Today, the book’s concerns feel strikingly contemporary. It portrays how information circulates, how arguments gather momentum, and how public spirit can elevate or fragment a community. By showing people grappling with competing loyalties and complicated trade-offs, it raises questions about responsibility in times of stress and change. Readers will recognize the tensions between principle and expedience, belonging and exclusion, candor and comfort. In its steady attention to the ways ordinary choices shape public life, the narrative offers not prescriptions but a framework for thinking—one that rewards patience, curiosity, and an appreciation for the collective labor of building trust.
Approached as a study in civic character, The Rising of the Tide offers readers a thoughtful, spoiler-safe immersion into the everyday mechanics of conscience and community. Tarbell’s perspective—clear, fair-minded, and grounded in lived detail—makes the narrative both historically anchored and freshly relevant. It is a book for those drawn to stories where stakes are moral as much as material, and where transformation arrives not through spectacle but through deliberation. By the end, readers are likely to find themselves revisiting their own assumptions about neighborliness, leadership, and the steady work of shaping a common life.
Synopsis
Ida M. Tarbell’s The Rising of the Tide opens in Sabinsport, a representative American river town whose mills, shops, churches, and clubs define everyday life. The narrative sketches a cross-section of citizens—merchants, workers, professionals, and newcomers—whose routines reflect prewar prosperity and complacency. Local institutions, especially the newspaper and civic associations, shape opinion and mediate disputes. Tarbell presents the town’s rhythms in detail: evening gatherings on porches, debates at club meetings, and a firm belief that national questions rarely touch local thresholds. This foundation situates characters and readers in a community poised, unbeknownst to itself, for sweeping tests of loyalty, judgment, and civic responsibility.
News of conflict in Europe arrives first as distant headlines and maps, provoking curiosity more than alarm. The townspeople parse reports with cautious detachment, arguing over neutrality in barbershops and parlors. Some residents call for strict noninvolvement; others worry that the world’s troubles cannot be kept at bay. The German-born and other immigrant families experience conflicting expectations, balancing affection for homelands with American commitments. Churches sponsor collections for relief, and schoolrooms discuss geography and causes. Through these early conversations, Tarbell shows initial uncertainty hardening into positions, while Sabinsport’s leaders try to keep tempers low and commerce steady amid widening global disruption.
As the war continues abroad, economic currents reach Sabinsport. Mill orders expand, wages rise, and businesses prosper, raising questions about profit and duty. Labor tensions flicker as longer hours and higher output strain routine arrangements. The newspaper intensifies coverage and launches series on preparedness, citizenship, and the proper bounds of national policy. Civic groups organize lectures and debates, bringing visiting speakers whose views sometimes clash with local habits. Families begin to sense that decisions made far away affect their own budgets and plans. Through commerce, conversation, and community action, the town learns that neutrality itself demands choices that carry material and moral weight.
Dramatic incidents at sea and on land sharpen opinion and diminish the comfort of distance. Reports of civilian casualties and contested propaganda circulate, pushing Sabinsport to confront the reliability of sources and the meaning of justice. Preparedness parades and volunteer drills appear, and with them controversy over militarism versus prudence. Clergy, teachers, and club officers convene forums to weigh conscience, law, and national duty. The school board revises civics instruction to emphasize rights alongside obligations. Tarbell shows how public rituals, editorials, and meeting resolutions aggregate into a new civic posture, even as the town struggles to keep debate civil and inclusive.
Local politics mirror national uncertainty as an election season brings slogans, platforms, and more pointed argument. Citizens debate the nature of Americanism and the responsibilities of those with ties abroad. Programs labeled Americanization expand, from English classes to citizenship lectures, aiming to unite neighbors under common ideals without erasing heritage. The newspaper profiles town institutions and publishes letters from readers who articulate varied, sometimes contradictory, definitions of loyalty. Commerce continues, but a new emphasis on public service tempers private pursuits. By the close of this phase, Sabinsport has moved from passive observation to active preparation, while still hoping to avoid direct entanglement.
When the United States enters the war, Sabinsport’s deliberations transform into mobilization. The declaration reaches the town through extra editions and courthouse gatherings, followed by enlistments, draft registrations, and farewells. Committees form to manage Liberty Loan drives, Red Cross chapters, conservation campaigns, and training schedules. Women assume expanded roles in factories, offices, and relief kitchens, while schools adapt to teach practical skills and morale. The practical arrangements of supply, service, and sacrifice become daily routines. Tarbell maps how ordinances, timetables, and checklists knit personal lives into public purpose, and how the town’s earlier debates shape its response to immediate demands.
With mobilization come strains that test fairness as much as stamina. Shortages, price controls, and rumors provoke disputes; vigilance committees and new laws sharpen the line between dissent and disloyalty. Sabinsport’s German-American families feel scrutiny, prompting leaders to defend due process while affirming unity. A handful of incidents—whispered accusations, hasty punishments narrowly avoided, and sober apologies—become lessons in balancing security with civil liberty. Correspondence from training camps and overseas filters through homes and offices, personalizing the abstract aims of policy. Tarbell depicts the town learning restraint and proportion, reaffirming that the means of defending the nation must reflect its professed ideals.
As the war advances, the costs grow tangible. Casualty lists appear, and families measure anxious weeks between letters. The influenza epidemic sweeps through, forcing closures and exhausting volunteers. Factories and farms maintain output under tight schedules and stricter standards, while relief agencies manage supplies for soldiers and neighbors alike. Public ceremonies offer solace, but Tarbell avoids sensational detail, focusing instead on steady service, quiet grief, and the coordination of institutions under pressure. The news of armistice arrives in a mixture of jubilation and relief, coupled with a sober awareness that the habits formed during emergency will shape the community’s future.
In the aftermath, Sabinsport takes stock of what the war has changed and what it has clarified. Civic groups reorganize for peacetime, businesses reassess practices, and schools integrate lessons learned about cooperation and responsibility. Women’s expanded contributions influence local leadership, and immigrant families’ commitments are recognized in public acknowledgments. Tarbell frames the “rising of the tide” as the town’s moral and civic awakening: a collective movement from complacency to considered engagement. The book closes by emphasizing continuity of duty—service beyond the crisis—and confidence that democratic habits, nurtured in ordinary places, can endure strain and guide the community through whatever comes next.
Historical Context
Ida M. Tarbell’s The Rising of the Tide is set in the United States during the tumultuous years 1914–1919, chiefly in the fictional town of Sabinsport, a composite Midwestern river-and-rail community with factories, banks, churches, and immigrant neighborhoods. The place mirrors small industrial towns that felt national currents through newspapers, commodity prices, enlistment notices, and wartime regulations. It is a Progressive-Era landscape adjusting to modern industry, municipal reform, and expanding civic organizations. As Europe descends into war in August 1914, Sabinsport remains formally neutral yet economically tied to Atlantic trade. By 1917, the home front becomes an engine of mobilization—draft boards, bond drives, Red Cross chapters—capturing how national policy reshapes local life.
The European war’s outbreak in July–August 1914, triggered by the Sarajevo assassination and the German invasion of Belgium, placed the United States under President Woodrow Wilson in a posture of neutrality. American commerce tilted toward Britain and France; debates over rights at sea and contraband intensified. At home, the Preparedness Movement (1915–1916)—backed by figures like Theodore Roosevelt, the National Security League, and the Plattsburg training camps in New York—called for military readiness, while pacifists and many German- and Irish-Americans resisted. The novel reflects these arguments in town meetings, editorials, and club discussions, presenting Sabinsport as a bellwether of national opinion struggling over neutrality, defense, and civic duty.
Escalating maritime crises drove the United States toward war. Germany’s submarine campaign sank the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 Americans, prompting U.S. protests and the 1916 Sussex pledge. When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, 1917, and the Zimmermann Telegram (sent January 1917, published March 1) proposed a German-Mexican alliance against the United States, public sentiment shifted decisively. Diplomatic relations were severed February 3, 1917. The Rising of the Tide dramatizes this pivot: town skeptics, ethnic communities, and idealists confront a rising moral argument for intervention, with the novel’s “tide” evoking the accumulating weight of submarine casualties, intercepted cables, and affronts to neutral rights.
The U.S. declaration of war on April 6, 1917, initiated vast mobilization: the Selective Service Act (May 18, 1917) registered millions; camps sprang up nationwide. The Committee on Public Information (April 13, 1917) organized "Four Minute Men" speeches, films, and posters to unify opinion. Simultaneously, the Espionage Act (June 15, 1917) and Sedition Act (May 16, 1918) criminalized interference with the draft and disloyal speech; the American Protective League assisted federal surveillance. Raids on IWW offices in 1917 and prosecutions of dissenters signaled the costs of wartime unity. Tarbell’s town witnesses loyalty parades, oath-taking, and scrutiny of critics, revealing how patriotic consensus could shade into coercion and community policing.
Home-front organization reshaped daily life. The War Industries Board (established July 28, 1917; chaired by Bernard M. Baruch from March 1918) coordinated production and raw materials; the U.S. Food Administration under Herbert Hoover (created August 10, 1917) promoted "meatless Mondays" and "wheatless Wednesdays"; the Fuel Administration urged conservation and introduced daylight saving time in March 1918. Four Liberty Loan drives (1917–1918) and the 1919 Victory Loan financed the war; bond rallies featured local dignitaries and bands. The American Red Cross, led by Henry P. Davison, surged from roughly 286,000 members in 1916 to over 20 million by 1918. In Sabinsport, auxiliary rooms, factory canteens, and schoolrooms model this mobilization, highlighting women’s leadership and civic voluntarism as engines of national service.
Wartime nationalism exacerbated nativism and ethnic suspicion, especially toward German-Americans. States and towns curtailed German-language instruction; Iowa’s Babel Proclamation of May 23, 1918, banned public use of foreign languages. Communities renamed foods ("liberty cabbage" for sauerkraut) and purged German music from programs. Vigilante incidents and loyalty tests proliferated under the banner of "100% Americanism." The novel mirrors these frictions through neighbors under surveillance, immigrant pastors negotiating loyalty, and school boards rewriting curricula. Tarbell’s portrayal underscores the fragile place of ethnic pluralism under pressure, showing how civic zeal could drift into cultural erasure and how longstanding communities navigated loyalty without abandoning heritage.
The closing war year and aftermath brought trauma and transition. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million globally and about 675,000 in the United States, overwhelming local hospitals and closing schools and churches. The Armistice of November 11, 1918, ushered in demobilization and dislocation. In 1919, strikes and unrest—from the Seattle General Strike (February 1919) to the national steel strike (September 1919)—and the Red Scare, including the Palmer Raids (November 1919–January 1920), exposed anxieties about radicalism. Racial violence during the Red Summer, notably Chicago (July–August 1919), revealed deep fissures. Sabinsport’s postwar scenes register grief, reintegration of veterans, and contested definitions of order, liberty, and social peace.
As social and political critique, the book scrutinizes the moral economy of wartime America: it celebrates genuine civic cooperation yet exposes how pressure for unanimity enabled censorship, vigilantism, and suspicion of minorities and dissenters. It interrogates profiteering and unequal burdens as factories prosper while soldiers’ families tighten household budgets, and it questions how class and gender shaped who led and who served in volunteer campaigns. By staging debates over neutrality, preparedness, and coercive loyalty laws, the narrative warns against conflating patriotism with conformity. The portrait of Sabinsport contends that a democratic nation must mobilize effectively without sacrificing civil liberties, pluralism, and ethical public reason.
