The printer, who for two years had been harried by Flood’s nonchalance, taught her the basic terms like “galley,” which she had thought meant an ancient war vessel, and showed her how to fill in a dummy or lay out the page. She learned to read type upside down and backward when it was in the forms, and to rearrange lines when a much-needed ad was called in at the last minute. He taught her everything except how to set type. They became tacit partners in turning out The Chautauquan despite the vagaries of its editor in chief.
Soon Flood began putting what he considered pesky correspondence on her desk. Often these letters were cries for help, confessions of troubles and needs. Ida, wanting desperately to help, poured out her counsel in reply and signed her letters T. L. Flood.
Her advice was so empathetic and heartfelt that an erudite foreigner turned up in Meadville to see the one man in America who had understood his ideas. Confronted by the visitor, Flood, and her letters, Tarbell confessed and forswore writing letters of advice.
After mastering routine chores, Ida began to contribute to “The Editor’s Notebook,” a compendium of news items and comments ranging from the death of the advocate of abolition and woman suffrage Sojourner Truth, to the doings of President Chester Arthur and the news that Mark Twain was going into the printing business.
She further proved her usefulness by translating articles from the Revue des Deux Mondes, a French literary magazine. The United States did not at that time feel the need of a copyright law to protect foreign authors and so American editors, Tarbell included, freely helped themselves to the Continent’s literature.
The Meadville office atmosphere is evoked in an article she later wrote on women in journalism: “The editor-in-chief knows what he wants and does not want, and all work must be done in accordance with his views; often in direct opposition to personal tastes.” Speaking of women in the field, she reflected implicitly on her own role, seeming to feel that she kept things running smoothly: “Being refined, she will add fineness; being compassionate, she will add compassion; being conscientious, she will add conscience in a larger measure …”3
Ida advised that, in order to succeed, a woman must be enthusiastic, have wide-ranging knowledge and self-control, especially over tears when a editor criticized a story: “She must not put forward her femininity to such an extent as to demand that the habits of an office be changed on her account; nor can she presume on her womanhood.” Tarbell’s test of success in the profession was whether one could thrive under drudgery, but the hard work paid off.
From an initial circulation of fifteen thousand in October 1880, The Chautauquan grew to fifty thousand by the mid-eighties, when it moved into a two-story fortress with a crenellated roof. The building’s unusual features included natural gas heat, steam-powered machinery, and pneumatic tubes through which Miss Tarbell spoke to the printers one floor below.
The Chautauquan was feminist in its concerns and basically benign. Its underlying tone implied that this was the best of all possible worlds and that improvements, should they appear to be necessary, would soon be made.
Tarbell herself watched events with a different perspective. From her daily reading of the liberal Republican New York Tribune, she gathered a sense that outside the scope of The Chautauquan the 1880s dripped with blood. Throughout 1886, glove makers, stove molders, meat packers, and other working brethren struck for better wages and the eight-hour day. In Chicago that May, a mass protest in Haymarket Square against the killing of strikers turned into a riot when a bomb killed several policemen, and other officers fired into the crowd. She and others on the magazine supported the eight-hour day, contracts for labor and capital, temperance (if not the politically hot issue of prohibition), and the Knights of Labor, workers who sought to unite in one great union. At her suggestion, Flood ran articles on social and economic problems and what was being done to rectify them.
She was, in short, the perfect Mugwump: an independent Republican whose first political hero would be Grover Cleveland, the corruption-hating Democrat who fought the protective tariff. She already had her first anti-hero, a New York politician named Theodore Roosevelt, who broke ranks with independents in 1884 to support the Republican party’s nominee, incumbent James G. Blaine, whom Cleveland defeated.
In annexing more and more responsibility, Tarbell discovered she had not only a job, but a career. She worked long hours and assumed the duties, if not the title, of managing editor. She approved articles, saw them through the publishing process, and headed the staff of women that Flood began to gather about him.
The two most important colleagues—and friends—in her life were Josephine Henderson and Mary Henry. Jo had been a year behind Ida in high school and college and had a way of countering Ida’s more fanciful dreams with deflating common sense. Her letters indicate that she would have liked suitors, but somehow they failed to appear. Ida wrote of her: “Jo … was a handsome woman with a humorous outlook on life—healthy for me. I never had a friend who judged my balloons more shrewdly or pricked them so painlessly.”4
Mary Henry was the youngest and prettiest of the group. Daughter of a militant in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Mary came from a family of five children in Silver Lake, New York. There was apparently never enough money but Mary was a bit of a spendthrift, which amazed Ida who grew quite practical when the money she spent was her own. Mary, like many of the women who attended the Chautauqua Assembly, was nearly in thrall to the charismatic Bishop Vincent. Ida wrote with amusement to a mutual friend about Mary’s attachment: “Bishop V has been to see her and she told me of the long visit with him which always does her so much good. He took her to lunch, etc. and now she’ll run on a few months.”5
If she teased Mary Henry, she was not malicious. Judging from the affection her co-workers evidenced in letters over the years, she was thoughtful of others’ feelings and dignity. She seems to have administered by knowing others’ jobs as well as they did—after all, she had done most of them when she was Flood’s only assistant. She was willing to set aside a manuscript she was editing if some human need seemed more pressing, even if she had to keep the printers waiting in the process. A school friend recalled, “Some farmer would come into the office and start to tell her about his crops and she would pay him as much attention [as if he were] a brilliant doctor.”6
As Tarbell’s life centered more and more in Meadville, she tired of boarding with the Floods and declared independence by renting a room elsewhere. Finding that impersonal, unhomely, and therefore unsatisfactory, she looked for another solution. In time, she and three friends from the office—Jo Henderson, Harriet Carter, and Elda Long, the office manager—decided to live together “co-operatively.” Some of the male students at Allegheny had boarded through such a plan and the magazine ran an article by feminist Mary Livermore proposing that different families should share food preparation and eat together so that woman’s work would not needlessly be duplicated. Whatever inspired them, the arrangement probably worked along the lines Carter described in an article: “We had already cared for ourselves so long that each one had grown to be quite a business woman and had acquired that self-reliance and independence which are necessary to make work a pleasure. We proved to be a congenial company and very soon became fast friends. Being members of the same church and entering the same social circle, it seemed as if everything conspired to unite our interests. In private life alone we were entirely separated, four of us boarding—scattered about in different places—and one keeping house with her mother.”7
The mother of one became “the mother of all” and managed the accounts. Two girls rented separate suites in her house, the others boarded nearby. For twenty-five dollars monthly, they shared a kitchen and dining room and hired a maid and a washingwoman. Other women petitioned to join, but the four friends refused to expand their circle. They liked to be able to discuss the office over dinner.
Living in such a manner was innovative and daring, suggesting a commitment to the sing
le state of life. These were not girls awaiting marriage, but women wanting homes of their own, privacy for their own pursuits, and a place where they could initiate and repay social invitations. As for domestic duties, these were farmed out for pay.
Cooking interested Ida only because her family did it well. She learned to make waffles, pie crusts, and Scotch woodcock only to show she could do it. She regarded domestic skills as “parlor tricks,” and when finally called to cook for relations in her sixties, she termed the results “so tragic the family didn’t speak of them.”8
Domesticity was not for Ida or her closest girlfriends who were still unmarried in their late twenties, but she had to have noticed that she was missing out another kind of life—marriage, woman’s “natural state.” About this time Will, who had practiced law in the Dakotas for four years, returned to Titusville with his wife, established a home adjacent to his parents, and joined the movement to rally independents against the Standard Oil Company. His wife gave birth to two daughters and a son. Ida adored the children, but showed no inclination to have her own. She was set on using her abilities in the world.
This state of mind is suggested by two unfinished pieces of fiction she began to write. In one, Margaret Sydney, “determined-looking” in the fashion of Tarbell heroines, had decided on a risky course. “She was not a young girl, was, as her family pointed out, beginning to be an old maid—nearly thirty with no idea of marrying—with the determination she’d had as a high school girl of good family of moderate means to make something of herself.”9
Ida did not seriously entertain thoughts of any man, least of all a Mr. Kellogg who wanted to marry her. When they were old ladies, one of her co-workers reminded her about it in a letter. “Among the various things I told my young friend about you was the time Mr. Kellogg visited the Floods, how he took us all to the horse farm on an all-day trip and in the evening came to call at the Co-ops intending to propose to you. He had talked it over with Dr. Flood and you were warned. You begged Jo and me to stay in the parlor as long as he did so he couldn’t have a private word with you.”10
One cannot be sure of the identity of this gentleman, but a James H. Kellogg was active in Sunday school activities and a frequent visitor to the assembly. Most works on Chautauqua cite him as a wealthy merchant and lifelong bachelor of Troy, New York, who in 1889 built Kellogg Hall, an administration building on the Chautauqua community grounds, as a memorial to his mother.11
Whether or not this was the fellow, someone offered marriage at some point. In late middle age she scribbled a note on a manuscript titled “Disillusion of Women” which read: “I never met a man I would want always at my side night and day and I am sure I will not. A man who even dreamed he would [want] me always by his side—he had his escape.”
She did catch the eye of Meadville’s most intriguing bachelor, a Judge John I. Henderson some fifteen years Ida’s senior, who had been elected presiding judge of Meadville after fifteen years as district attorney. Apparently, he made overtures to Ida but was rebuffed. After she left Meadville, he wrote to her, but she reported to her parents: “Don’t be alarmed. It is as informal as he is about as non-committal. He gives me a good deal of gossip …”
Both her family and Jo insisted he was interested in Ida, but Ida wrote: “I have a suspicion that you people think perhaps I am inclined to join in the countless victims that mark His Honor’s path through life. I hope you’ll dissuade yourself of the notion. If there is any victim at this picnic it isn’t I.“12
Perhaps the judge had encouraged many young women and Ida felt herself too smart to be fooled, but her letters show she seemed to think it shameful to be admired. She reported to her parents a man’s attentions and then dismissed them with hauteur. “Don’t worry, I’m not debasing myself,” she seemed to tell them.
Up to this point, man was a creature she preferred in the abstract. As a shy adolescent, Ida had feared or shunned boys her own age and fantasized about males she could not even talk to. As a young woman who found work she loved, Ida had little time for men. Her mother’s life and the family story of how she was forced to give up teaching after her wedding day were ample illustration that one did not combine marriage with any work outside the home. Even if one found a remarkable man who would allow his wife a career, the realities of pregnancy and child-rearing precluded life in an office. Only in the realm of fantasy was she safe. Ida was transported, or at least quite touched, when a man seemed heroic, his achievement outstanding, and his mind pure. One such male was a dashing rogue who convinced Meadville he was an army captain and sold Flood a story he had copied from a government report. Ida had the distinction of being taken driving by him—before he fled town in a borrowed military cape.
In the summers the Chautauqua Institute, a place of almost postcard Americana prettiness, drew distinguished lecturers who were also unavailable men attractive to Ida. John Pentland Mahaffy, an Anglo-Irish classics scholar at the University of Dublin, was eighteen years her senior and a special friend. He presented her with white poppy seeds from the Nile that she planted first in her mother’s garden and later transplanted to her Connecticut farm.
Most visitors were touched by the Chautauquans’ desire for knowledge; at the same time they were put off by their ignorant righteousness. Rudyard Kipling, boggled by the preponderance of book-reading girls overflowing the verandas, told one of them he was from India and was mistaken for a missionary. He was struck by the way the very people who said they would rather see their children dead than defile the Sabbath were the same ones who would try to sneak onto the grounds for free.
William James said of the community: “The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air … And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: ‘Ouf, what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenia massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring.’”13
Ida shared this view, while also feeling that fine work was being done there. The institute did not shy away from debate, even if it was over the heads of most Chautauquans. James was asked to speak on psychiatry. Controversial educators were also invited, including some innovators from Johns Hopkins University who were prominent in introducing social sciences like economics and local American history into college curriculums. One of these was Herbert B. Adams who later became a close friend. She wrote him asking him to show someone the institute and implored: “I don’t want her to see only the surface Chautauqua. It would displease her as it always did me and if I don’t mistake, does you.”14
In her own life, writing was now the most important thing. Ida discovered she loved creating stories or at least beginning them, for they trailed off without conclusion. At night, fiction flowed from her pen and onto paper torn from old ledgers at The Chautauquan. Judging from surviving fragments, her creativity ebbed as quickly as it flowed. Once inspiration ran out, she laid the work aside, thus making the critical error of many unsure beginners.
Throughout her life she would protest that she never had “the writer’s call,” that she happened upon the profession and labored painfully until she could produce acceptable work, but the stories indicate she was passionately committed to writing.
In common with most writers, she wrote out of her own experience and obsessions. One heroine named Jane with literary ambitions was a source of fun to Ida herself and to the mother she created for the character: Jane considered her austere room an atelier and littered it with a writer’s appurtenances. She had “twenty-nine varieties of pens, pen holders of twelve sizes, ink of all colors and spectrums, wood pulp blotters, mucilage and devices for ungluing postage stamps.” One can imagine the adolescent Tarbell’s microscope a
nd scientific paraphernalia taking the place of the welter of stationery the character Jane acquired.
Ida also played with the concept of an “anti-utopia” based on the panoply of trusts that sprang up patterned after Standard Oil’s organization. These included the American Cotton Seed Trust, the National Linseed Oil Trust and the Whiskey Trust. These symptoms of rampant industry had already been the butt of satire. In 1888, Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, which criticized nineteenth-century capitalism from the vantage point of the year 2000 when, as he portrayed it, all would have been perfected through socialism and the higher instincts of man. Tarbell, like most of the reading public, was riveted.
More sarcastic than satirical, her own effort took the form of a letter suggesting that those who controlled trusts could become America’s aristocrats: “There will come to exist a set of families with common interests—we’ll have an Order of the Oyster, an Order of the Olive, the Order of the Poultry, according to the article which it controls. The wealth policy and privileges of order will descend from father to son. We will have at last a heraldry worthy of the nation of everlasting accumulation. In the [here she wrote and crossed out the word “Standard”] Order of Zinc, for instance, we shall have Smith I, Smith II, Smith III and so on from generation to generation.”
From social commentary about upward mobility she returned to fiction. Again incorporating her own experiences into her writing, she attempted a novel that would show how the oil business changed and divided those she knew. The plot revolved around the growing shadow that a sinister firm called M & M Vacuum cast over the boomtown of Pithole. A young man named Tom grew fascinated with oil and began to fall under the sway of an agent of M & M as he fell in love with Norah, daughter of a farmer who stood in the way of the firm’s land grabs. Ida abandoned the work after about six thousand words, dissatisfied with her effort and convinced that she lacked the ability to turn the story into art. Frustrated by fiction, she decided journalism might be more in her line.
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