These semiannual expenditures were followed by the money-saving ritual of sorting scraps for quilts and the immolation of remnants whose ashes would fertilize the garden. As the red tongues of the bonfire lapped in the twilight Ida’s father would affirm, “Nothing lost but the smoke.” Nearby, she gazed at the flickering colors dreaming of fashions and laces in the comfort of her less demanding second-best dress, which she gathered under her to sit on the steps.
Learning early the importance of money, Ida decided to earn her own. The opportunity came when oil stocks began to climb and even the teachers were tempted to abandon the high school in their avidity to trade. Ida asked her father for a hundred dollars so she could get into the market. “His eyes were steely at first, but they gradually twinkled. He inveighed: ‘No daughter of his, no child of his, would demean herself by gambling.’” He warned her that some grew so addicted to the market that after they lost everything, they would bet pennies simply on which way the market would fluctuate. She had to accept his decision, but when she grew up and made her own money, she was good at making investments in the market and in choosing men to advise her.
Despite her father’s caution, in early 1872 the oil market promised to spiral ever upward, but abruptly profits were choked off when railroads raised shipping rates one hundred percent. Independent oil producers learned that railroad companies were making them pay astronomical charges while an outfit called the South Improvement Company, based in Cleveland, was given rebates in direct violation of federal law.
In Titusville, angry oilmen swore they would not be eradicated by an outside alliance. Franklin attended anti-monopoly meetings in halls where overhead banners proclaimed proud American mottoes—“Don’t Give Up the Ship!” “No Surrender!” “United We Stand!”
The speeches were sufficiently inflammatory that the usually moderate Franklin joined processions of vigilantes who raided oil cars owned by South Improvement and burned out fellow independents who broke ranks.
Franklin Tarbell’s personality changed. His old forms of relaxation—playing his jew’s harp or telling his family about his day—were no more. He did not sing to Sarah nor take pleasure in his after-dinner cigar. What rankled him was not business frustration alone but a sense of injustice.
He was probably not a very good businessman. He could spot an oil field, build superior equipment, work hard, but his philosophy was too quaint for the times in which he lived. He believed that individualism was good, debt was bad, hidden deals carried a stigma, and fights must be fair. The exemplar of the day was Benjamin Franklin who would never stoop so low as to steal business from a competitor.7 That the South Improvement Company could prosper through dishonorable tactics outraged him.
Behind the scenes, John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company was the master of the South Improvement Scheme. Aware of everything in the oil business, he may even have known Franklin Tarbell’s name, but he would not have respected it. The oil magnate was calculating about opponents. Those who were bold and resourceful he wanted at his side. In time he plucked the best of those who fought him, such as John D. Archbold (later president of Standard Oil of New Jersey), Henry Rogers, and Charles Pratt, and made them officers of his company. Someone like Franklin Tarbell would not have interested him at all.
But Franklin’s interpretations of the oil war were burned into Ida’s mind. For her the hullabaloo took on the significance of the fall of the Bastille, which she was reading about in school. She absorbed her father’s indignation and made it her own: “There was born in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy to be sure, but it still was well, at fifteen, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one.”
Public outrage and the law eventually defeated the South Improvement Company. The fact that railroads were chartered as public utilities open to all customers at equal rates meant that the South Improvement Company could not operate under favored conditions. The independents’ victory was short. They soon found themselves squeezed in another fashion. John D. Rockefeller agreed to buy all of the Pennsylvanians’ oil, but then, claiming they had produced more than was good for the industry, he reneged on the contracts. Rockefeller succeeded not only in depriving the oil producers of customers, but in humiliating them as well.
Ida deeply felt her father’s sorrows. However she may have sided with her mother in the matter of household finances, Ida adored Franklin and was protective of him. In general, the Tarbell children all spoke reverently of both their parents, but they were more sentimental about their father. Ida never forgave a neighbor who convinced Franklin to give up his cigar and send the money to the missions; even as old women she and Sarah could work themselves into a dudgeon about it. He was sensitive, even about his appearance, and went so far as to cover his baldness with a brown wig, a vanity that shocked Methodist elders. What can be reconstructed of his personality comes mostly from a memoir by his granddaughter which Ida treasured.8 If there was a similar work about Ida’s mother, it has not survived.
Franklin was fundamentalist in relation to his Heavenly Father, but his posture as an earthly son is unclear. There is only one mention of a paternal relative, a cousin, in Ida’s papers. Records indicate that Franklin was the youngest of four brothers who lived passed infancy. His mother Asenath died when he was seven. His father William remarried, had more children, and lived to his eighty-eighth year in 1881. William lived fifty miles from Titusville, but Ida’s maternal grandparents were the only ones she ever referred to in her papers.
William Charles Tarbell, for whom Ida’s brother was named, had served in the important battles along the Canadian frontier in the War of 1812; but Franklin had been too young for the dispute with Mexico and too engrossed with business for the Civil War. If he was estranged from his father, Franklin’s appreciation of independence is all the more understandable. Ida described how he disdained anyone who would work for wages: “I am sure my father would rather have grubbed corn meal and bacon from a piece of stony land which was his own than have had all the luxuries on a salary … to his way of thinking taking orders … was failure for an American.”
During her teens, Ida saw two significant battles—the independents’ against Rockefeller and woman’s struggle for the vote. “My mother was facing a little reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in society. She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to ‘vindicate her sex’ by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight would have delighted her,” Ida wrote.
The Tarbell home was always open to visitors, especially those with a crusade. Her father particularly welcomed Prohibitionists, her mother those working for Woman’s Rights. In Ida’s mind, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony took their places beside abolitionists, civil service reformers, and Abraham Lincoln.
Esther Tarbell and her visitors endlessly debated such issues as woman’s true nature and what she could attain, but to the representative of future womanhood, the young girl sitting among them, they paid no attention at all.
Ida was too shy to ask questions, to point out inconsistencies in their statements, or to say what these subjects meant to her. Unlike visiting male lecturers, the women did not notice her and she resented it.
“I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either touched me, saw me, of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I noted too that the men we entertained did notice me, talked to me as a person and not merely as a possible member of a society they were promoting,” Ida recalled.
One incident was especially painful. The family spent part of its summers on Chautauqua Lake where there was a celebrated Methodist summer camp that brought in distinguished lecturers. Ida Tarbell, once she grew too old to play tag on the relief model of Palestine, was enthralled by the presentations on science. When two women, the Misses La
ttimore, demonstrated a microscope, she longed to look through the lens they handled so deftly and watch the life that swam and quivered in its field. Ida rehearsed a little speech about wanting to be a microscopist herself and asking them to help and advise her. She delivered it as best she could and was rebuffed.
“The two ladies smiled down from their height, so plainly showing they thought me a country child with a queer behavior complex. ‘Quite impossible,’ they said and turned back to their conference … abashed, humiliated, but luckily too angry to cry, I made my way back to my flat-bottomed boat. I would show them, I resolved, clenching my fists!”9
Her skepticism about woman’s superiority grew as she followed the New York Herald’s accounts of how in a fit of pique, Victoria Woodhull, spiritualist and feminist, revealed the adulterous affair of Henry Ward Beecher, the famous preacher and proponent of woman suffrage: “What I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the testimony word by word in our newspapers) did not increase my regard for my sex. [It] did not seem to substantiate what I heard about the subjection of women, nor did what I observed nearer home convince me. Subjection seemed to me fairly divided. That is all: I saw there were ‘henpecked men’ as well as ‘downtrodden women.’ The chief unfairness I recognized was in the handling of household expenses.”
Crusade was in the air of the Tarbell home. As the father chafed under John D. Rockefeller’s encroachments and the mother churned with the injustice of woman’s lot, the daughter struggled with the complexities of evolution and her place in the world. She thought at the time that her interests lay with suffragists, and was so vehement that she later mocked herself. She wrote of young girls confused by the militancy of the 1870s and of course she meant the young Ida: “What it was really about they never knew until it was too late. The young American woman of militant cast finds it easy to believe that the business of being a Woman is slavery. She had her uneasy mother’s pains and sacrifices and tears before her and she resents them. She meets the militant theory on every hand that the distress she loathes is of man’s doing, that it is for her to revolt, to seize his business, and so doing escape his tyranny, find a worth-while life for herself and at the same time help ‘liberate her sex.’”10
But in the 1870s, as a girl who loved learning and her own dignity and whose mother felt cringingly dependent, Ida decided two causes were worth working for—the right to education and the right to control her own money. At night she sank to her knees and prayed to God to spare her from marriage and send her to college instead.
Two
Pantheistic Evolutionist
When Ida Tarbell entered Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, just before her nineteenth birthday, she felt she had reached her spiritual home. The cornerstone of Bentley Hall, a three-story brick building topped by a cupola, had been laid fifty-six years before, which seemed an aeon to one used to the oil regions. She revered Bentley as the first tangible sign that anything could be permanent.
The campus embraced paths and drives and a ravine through which flowed a rocky stream. It was the Forest of Arden and she was Rosalind taking on a boy’s ways for her own ends. Her mother, who had been vexed when Ida classified leaves instead of sweeping the stairs, supported the idea of college for Ida. Franklin consented after the president of Allegheny appeared at the Sunday dinner table. Ida’s first choice was Cornell, another “man’s college” newly opened to women, but her father decided that the Methodist-affiliated institution which was only thirty miles away in Meadville would be better. He had the money for this frivolous experiment and for a year-long college preparatory course in Titusville, because his heavy investments in the Bradford oil fields promised steady, plentiful return.
To Ida’s dismay, she was the only girl in the freshman class. As boarding facilities for the seven female students were not yet ready, faculty wives opened their doors to her. “I went fearfully,” she later admitted, “thinking the president of a college on a par with a bishop.” Especially intimidating was the home of the classics and English professor, Ammi B. Hyde, whom she described as “so queer we were inclined to laugh at him, so full of knowledge we revered him.”1
Her preliminary weeks among the “great ones” were a trial until the promised girls’ house opened. Behind a dormitory where a hundred boys lived, “The Snow Flake” boasted seven warrenlike rooms. “Had we not been so well brought up and the housekeeper not been a dragon, we might have made mischief,”2 she said. They ached to communicate with the boys’ hall, but conscious of being on trial, vowed to be good. In this they were unlike the two girls who boarded downtown and were known to smoke in their rooms. Ida always remembered them: “They were rich and beautiful and did not stay at the school long, but created a stir which lasted for years.”3
Ida’s housemates, for the most part well-brought-up girls from Methodist households, were “nice,” but they could not have been strictly conventional. For a girl to go to college was a daring thing. Parents who spent money this way would have been at best ambitious for their daughters and at worst eager to display their wealth in a frivolous manner.
The notion seemed to catch on, however. Two of Ida’s closest friends from Titusville, Josephine Henderson and Iris Barr, joined her at Allegheny. There is so little record of the Henderson family that it is possible she lived in a stepfather’s home. Iris Barr, on the other hand, was a doctor’s daughter.
In the group, Ida was adventurous and outgoing. On her own she dreaded places like chapel, the campus, and the classroom where she would come in personal contact with males. Women were subjected to all the discomfort of being a social experiment, but they were still expected to follow the same curriculum as the men—English literature, philology, art history, the sciences, French, and German. While males played baseball and football, the women followed the Delsarte system of calisthenics, dressed in high-necked waists and bloomers and lifted Indian clubs and dumbbells. Ida was as athletic as girls were allowed to be, but she delighted more in the long dark library. There she climbed to the top of the ladder and crouched reading book after book.
Her encounters with people were unlike those she had experienced before. She felt for the first time the thrill of shared interests and the excitement of new ones when Jeremiah Tingley, head of the department of natural science, and his wife invited his students to their rooms in Bentley Hall. “They had no children, and in the years of their study and travel they had gathered around them things of beauty and interest. The atmosphere of those rooms was something quite new and wonderful to me. It was my first look into the intimate social life possible to people interested above all in ideas, beauty, music and glad to work hard and live simply to devote themselves to their cultivation.”
Discussions ranged from philosophy to politics and ideas like socialism, which radiated from German universities and to bold new ideas like Bell’s telephone. Discovering her passion for the microscope, Tingley urged Ida to use the binocular microscope belonging to the college. To her, the thought of it was like a violin to a musician, not only because it was more powerful than her own instrument, but because its two eyepieces meant she no longer had to squint.
As she dared to profess her belief in evolution, Tingley guided her to study a missing link which they called the Monopomo Alleghaniensis, a foot-long creature with gills and a lung which adapted itself to mud or water as circumstances required. Others saw it as the repulsive “mud puppy,” but she dissected it with awe and grew skillful with the scalpel. This species is not in reference books today. The closest creature is the crytobranchus alleganiensis or hellbender, which has no external gills.
Tingley encouraged Ida to discover things for herself. “That was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful way, that the true way was to know first what was in the books.”
He allowed her to experiment with the lab’s electrical apparatus and induction coil. She warmed to his understanding and attention. “This revelation of enthusiasm, its power to warm
and illuminate, was one of the finest and most lasting of my college experiences. The people I had known [in Titusville], teachers, preachers, doctors, businessmen, all went through their day’s work either with a stubborn, often sullen, determination to do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that they were not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I did not dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir you to his job.” Ida blossomed under his encouragement, both socially and scholastically.
“Ida Tarbell was a fine student,” recalled Iris Barr. “She would arise at 4 A.M. and get to work studying. She was never satisfied with any thing less than perfection. She was really fine in Latin, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.” Barr said this interest prompted Ida to urge Will, who followed her to Allegheny, not to join a fraternity. She preferred that he know people in all walks of life. Ida’s sister Sarah attended Allegheny’s preparatory courses. Little is known of her academic career except that she experimented with leaving the h off her name and Ida used alternate spellings ever after. Sarah left Allegheny when Ida graduated, possibly because she didn’t want to stay on alone or because of family finances. Ida never mentioned how her little sister’s presence affected her college life. With six years’ difference in their ages, they could not have shared many friends.
Ida’s social activities with her peers included coeducational parties where students would lock the chapel door and dance on the platform, but Ida, who now called herself a “pantheistic evolutionist,” retained enough Methodism not to dance.4 Throughout the course of the year, she and her friends sledded to neighboring Cambridge Springs and dined at the hotel. They went canoeing on the canal where Ida once fell in. She joined in the class project of rolling a boulder down the ravine and then, discovered by administrators, helped to roll it up again.
IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER Page 3