10 Whistleblowers Who Changed History 

While the term whistleblower may evoke the image of contemporary figures like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, whistleblowing has been a crucial counterbalance to corporate and political rapacity since antiquity. Whistleblowers—people who report a company or organization’s wrongdoings, regardless of whether they work there or not—are far more than mere tattletales or informants. They’ve been stalwart agents of accountability, exposing corruption and injustice while often risking their own safety, reputation, and livelihoods. Whether it be challenging the tyranny of fascistic regimes, exposing insatiable corporate greed, or safeguarding democratic ideals, whistleblowers have long since proved themselves to be an indispensable presence in our collective culture. 

1. Benjamin Franklin 
2. E.D. Morel 
3. Karen Silkwood 
4. Peter Buxtun 
5. Ida Tarbell 
6. Julius Chambers 
7. Mark Felt 
8. Daniel Ellsberg 
9. Samuel Shaw 
10. Cicero 

Benjamin Franklin 

Amid growing tensions between the American colonies and British Parliament, American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin came into possession of a series of incriminating letters written by Providence of Massachusetts Bay governor and lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver between 1768 and 1769. The letters offered proof that both Hutchinson and Oliver had mischaracterized civil unrest in Massachusetts Bay and sought support from the Crown to quash colonial dissenters. 

Franklin, who was living in London at the time, managed to send his information to the New World. The Boston Gazette published the letters in June 1773, prompting enraged colonists to burn effigies of Hutchinson and Oliver in the Boston Commons. Franklin’s identity as the originator of the leak was initially kept secret. But he admitted to his role in the imbroglio after his associate John Temple was accused and challenged to a duel by William Whatley. Following a public excoriation from Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn, Franklin decamped to the American colonies permanently as a stalwart supporter of the American independence movement. 

E.D. Morel 

While working for the now-defunct English trading company Elder Dempster, British journalist and activist E.D. Morel came across information suggesting Belgium’s trade with the Congo Free State was enormously exploitative of Congo’s indigenous population. He noticed Belgian ships primarily exported goods like firearms and manacles to Congo while incoming Congolese ships delivered valuable goods like rubber and copper.

Morel approached his superior at Elder Dempster about the discrepancy but was quickly brushed off. After refusing the company’s quid pro quo offer of a cushy consulting position in exchange for his silence, he quit and instead became a full-time journalist. 

He founded his own magazine, West African Mail, in 1903, and continued to publish firsthand accounts of the atrocities the Congolese were subject to under European colonialism. Legitimized by his prior access at Elder Dempster, Morel used a widespread network of Christian missionaries in Congo to obtain empirical accounts of the barbarism of European colonial forces. He established the Congo Reform Association in 1904; this launched a global campaign against Belgium’s repressive rule over the African nation.

Morel was able to exert pressure on the Belgian crown to annex and reform the Congo Free State as Belgian Congo with the help of famous literary figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain. While Belgium’s annexation of Congo certainly did not end Belgian abuses of the Congolese, its creation in part mitigated Belgian tyranny and moved Congo further toward its eventual independence in 1960.

Karen Silkwood 

Karen Silkwood, a lab technician for the energy conglomerate Kerr-McGee Corporation at their Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site, uncovered numerous health and safety violations endangering the facility’s employees. After being elected to the bargaining committee for the Oil, Chemical, & Atomic Workers Union in 1974, she began investigating the plant’s production of defective nuclear fuel rods. A routine self-test revealed she was contaminated with more than 400 times the legal limit for plutonium.

Silkwood suggested she’d been deliberately contaminated by Kerr-McGee in retaliation for her whistleblowing—then died in a mysterious one-person car crash while en route to meet with a New York Times reporter, leading some to speculate whether Kerr-McGee orchestrated her untimely demise in an effort to silence her. When Silkwood’s body was discovered pinned inside her vehicle, a slew of documents she’d claimed were evidence of Kerr-McGee’s malfeasance were conspicuously missing. The plant she’d worked at closed permanently about a year after her death and calls for more stringent nuclear regulations shifted to the forefront of legislative considerations surrounding federal nuclear energy policy. 

Peter Buxtun 

Peter Buxton overheard a colleague discussing what was officially known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male while working as an epidemiologist specializing in venereal diseases for the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1960s. The federally funded study began in 1932 and relied on the exploitation and deception of 600 impoverished Black sharecroppers whom the Public Health Service subjected to painful, ineffective treatments without providing the patients knowledge of their condition or the study’s purpose. 

After raising concerns about the study internally with Public Health Service officials to no avail, Buxtun took the information about the still-ongoing study to investigative journalist Jean Heller at the Associated Press in 1972. News of the fundamentally racist study became a national headline. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy called for a Congressional hearing on the matter and the study was officially shuttered shortly thereafter. Buxtun’s actions lead Congress to rewrite the rules and regulations surrounding human participation in medical experimentation. But the study’s revelation further exacerbated the Black community’s distrust of the medical establishment—the ramifications of which are still seen today. 

Ida Tarbell 

Ida Tarbell saw her father’s oil refinery business be annexed by J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in what became colloquially known as the Cleveland Massacre, causing her staunchly anti-trust ideology to crystallize early in her teen years. She later accepted a position at the American periodical McClure’s Magazine and began penning investigative articles about crime in the United States. Tarbell eventually turned her attention to the suppressive oil market monopolization performed by Standard Oil. 

In a series of articles that would later become the bedrock of her bestselling book The History of the Standard Oil Company, she plumbed the history of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, unveiling a smattering of untoward business practices implemented by Rockefeller to smother competing business. Her work ignited widespread public outrage that hastened the disassembly of Rockefeller’s reigning monopoly. While the fracturing of Rockefeller’s business inevitably benefited him financially, Tarbell’s galvanizing exposé helped catalyze the implementation of formative antitrust laws still in effect today. 

Julius Chambers 

On August 14, 1872, New York Tribune investigative journalist Julius Chambers was committed to New York Hospital’s Bloomingdale Insane Asylum after feigning insanity to gain access to the facility so he could document—and expose—its abysmal conditions. Chambers spent 10 days in the asylum before he was released with the help of his friends and editor. Following the publication of a series of articles in the Tribune alleging patient abuses and deplorable living conditions, 12 wrongfully-committed patients were released from the asylum and Bloomingdale’s underwent a widespread administrative restructuring that included the firing of some key staff. 

Chambers later expanded upon his reporting in his 1876 book A Mad World and Its People. He was one of the first activists against psychiatric abuse and marked a definitive turning of public opinion away from the draconian and inhumane practices of insane asylums as psychiatric practices were modernized. 

Mark Felt 

Former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt played an integral role in the Nixon administration’s precipitous implosion following the Watergate scandal. After robbers connected to the president’s reelection campaign were discovered breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate complex, Nixon and his administration embarked on a widespread campaign to cover up their involvement. Felt began leaking information surrounding the investigation to The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when it became clear to him that Nixon would not be held accountable. 

After remaining anonymous for more than 30 years, Felt, then 91, revealed himself to be “Deep Throat” in a 2005 article for Vanity Fair; his daughter had convinced him to publicly disclose his involvement before his death. Woodward and Bernstein substantiated Felt’s claim. In light of Felt’s 1980 criminal conviction for violating the civil rights of American citizens to carry out unwarranted searches, some speculated Felt’s motivation for leaking Watergate information was not entirely altruistic and was instead to further his own career in the FBI. 

Daniel Ellsberg 

Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent shockwaves through the country with his 1971 leak of a behemoth dossier cataloguing the United States’ clandestine operations during the Vietnam War. The 7000-page tome—later known as the Pentagon Papers—not only illustrated the U.S. government’s widespread deception of the public, but also showcased its integral role in having Ngo Dinh Diem [PDF] elected president of South Vietnam (a position he’d hold until his assassination in a CIA-backed coup in 1963). 

The White House Special Investigations Unit (better known as the White House Plumbers) broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an attempt to uncover information that would discredit the whistleblower. Though Ellsberg was initially charged with espionage, theft, and a slew of other salacious charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, all accusations against him were dropped when it was revealed the White House Special Investigations Unit illegally obtained evidence. 

Samuel Shaw 

Naval officer Samuel Shaw witnessed the brutal torture of British prisoners of war at the hands of Continental Navy Commander-in-Chief Esek Hopkins. He became one of first whistleblowers in the newly-established United States after reporting Hopkins’s abuses first to the Eastern Navy Board and later the Second Continental Congress. Though Hopkins was dishonorably discharged after an investigation overturned definitive proof of wrongdoing, the former Commander-in-Chief immediately retaliated against Shaw and the other whistleblowers by filing criminal libel charges against them. 

Congress—despite financial resources being seriously limited under the burgeoning Revolutionary War—authorized payment for Shaw and his fellow whistleblower’s legal defense and passed the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1778, the first piece of legislation of its kind. 

Cicero 

Roman politician Lucius Sergius Catilina began rallying a troupe of embittered conspirators to help him forcefully overthrow Marcus Tullius Cicero and and Gaius Antonius Hybrida after the two defeated him in the 62 BCE Roman consular election. Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus provided Cicero a collection of letters incriminating Catilina in the nascent coup d’état; Cicero spread word of Catilina’s alleged plans to burn Rome to the ground to preemptively turn the public against him. Cicero publicly revealed Catilina’s scheming in a series of legendary speeches, commonly referred to as Catilinarian orations, that he gave to the Roman senate. This demolished the latter’s political career and forced him from the city. 

Catalina, now officially exiled from the Roman Republic, decamped to central Italy in an effort to rally his forces and ready an attack on Cicero and Hybrida. He was defeated and killed by Hybrida’s forces in the Battle of Pistoria circa January 62 BCE. And while Cicero surely played a key role in revealing the machiavellian conspiracy to the public, some historians have argued he’d greatly exaggerated his role in the discovery to bolster his floundering political career.

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