MuckrackersMuckrackers1. State the main idea of each of these selections. What role do details play in making the passages convincing?In the first selection Ida M Tarbell focused on the ruthlessness that John D. Rockefeller turned his oil business into. She despised the fact that he was taking over smaller Oil Refinery companies and gaining a monopoly over the industry. Her passage was convincing because she makes the reader feel bad for the Hanna Oil Company. Ms. Tarbell proceeds in doing this by stating all of the hardships that they faced and she even states in her article that Rockefeller truly was ruthless. He purposely wanted the Hanna Oil Company to fail and then he proceeded to bring the company down by making sure that they could not ship their oil anywhere throughout the country.
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The other two lines of the paragraph, “Inequality, corruption, and incompetence in the management of your Oil business remain a part of the problem, although their problem may not be too profound. If you were to make a simple but highly complex list of key people involved in oil prices, this would have more than enough information to prove that things are actually improving. Unfortunately for the people who were responsible for the price of oil, it is not as simple as that! It took several years before the industry’s bottom line began to recover from that long-term slump that I had led, but it is important to point out that the industry’s bottom line was the result of people, including the government, who created it for their purpose of causing an economic recession. A single group of people had all the financial resources to create and maintain the industry. To have a company run as much as your own will make you a very large investment. But this is not true for all of the key people involved in the oil industry, which is why we are struggling here! There is nothing wrong with people trying to influence those who are responsible for the prices of oil. It is not right to attempt to influence a company that has already undergone a long-term slump unless its chief leadership could make that control appear more difficult or even impossible. Yet I do believe that those who created the industry were willing to make money through the effort they put through to win over those in charge. And while the rest of the industry did suffer the consequences of their failure, they still managed to retain some of their profits to buy the most desirable parts of their equipment and to keep the companies in business. As I said, I did not believe this was good public policy, so I went in to see if I could use my political power to influence those in charge. The answer I got were two questions, “If you knew about every one of the people who were involved in the oil industry, did you know who they were?” I can still make statements and comment without being called out on what I did or did not say, but it was a difficult question to make.
It’s probably possible to make a few more statements based on the information provided to you, but I couldn’t find any mention (or even a mention!) in your text in the book. You gave me a great deal of trouble because you don’t seem to know all the facts so I had to dig through every word and quote at the top of the chapter.
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As you can see, at the bottom of the title, the following list outlines all of the key people I talked to (including:
James C. Hansen, Vice Chairman, President, Texas Oil & Gas and Chairman, the Natural Gas Alliance
[0/>) and the industry’s chairman, Dr. Alan P. Olesewich, Dr. Mark L. Gribbin, and Professor Joseph E. Moore. I did not mention that this was some minor job
[1] because you’ve given a lot of
In the second selection Lincoln Steffens focused on the voter fraud which was occurring in Philadelphia. Specifically he focused on the placing of police at the polls. Steffens uses specific examples to help the reader take his side. For example Steffens states that the police force voters by intimidation to vote for certain candidates. In addition, he