IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  However much Ida worried about her family, her own poverty was a greater problem. As winter began to make its chill presence felt, Ida burned coal in her grate. She would sit with knit slippers pulled over her shoes and her shawl about her knees and would don her mackintosh before slipping under the covers. The romance of the garret gave way to its squalor. She learned the first lesson of bohemian living: appearances matter less than keeping warm. She now wore the skirt Sarah had given her three years before over her flannel underwear and used some precious savings to buy thick shoes to withstand the rain and cold. Always susceptible to colds, she had four in the first three months in Paris and worried that she was coming down with the influenza that had half the city bedridden. After a bout of intense work or prolonged celebrations with her friends, she would spend the next day prostrate with fatigue, treating herself with what the French called St. Raphael, a solution of quinine and water. She blamed the milk for upsetting her stomach and began a lifelong habit of drinking her coffee black.

  When “France Adorée” appeared in May 1892, she became a minor celebrity in the American community. After services at the American Church on Rue de Berri, acquaintances, including Theodore Stanton, head of The Associated Press in Paris, and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, whose husband was the minister to France, sought her out.

  Her projected biography of Mme Roland began to interest them and she was asked to lecture on the subject. A few months in Paris had made Manon Roland more real to her, more intelligible. Ida could now imagine her as a child on the Pont Neuf and as a condemned woman in the Conciergerie. By now the biographer herself had stood there and realized what a moral and spiritual triumph it must have been for Mme Roland to read at appointed hours each day, then write of her life as outside the mob cried for her head. In Sorbonne classes on political economy, French revolutionary history, and sixteenth-century literature, the age that made Manon Roland possible became clearer. Ida conveyed this so well that she was asked to repeat her addresses, and she began to think of lecturing as a way to support herself during her visits home.

  But interrupting her work on Mme Roland or her Sorbonne studies to prepare speeches and write five- and ten-dollar articles—for which she might not ever receive the checks—was excruciating and reduced her to tears she was too proud to shed before roommates.

  During the week she would restore herself by sitting in the cavernous hush of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, staring at the rose windows with their circles on circles of violet-tinged light. The motif drew her mind into order and silenced the clatter of fears and promises, obligations and possibilities, the endless discord that filled her head.

  Attending Catholic Mass also soothed her. In an ancient unknown tongue (despite Latin studies at Allegheny College), the words could not be filtered or evaluated by her mind. They were simply there to be felt. The rhythm of the chanting calmed her brain, the incense and the colors beguiled her senses. Her need to feel overcame her need to know, and she felt a oneness with these French whom she believed must be affected in the same way.

  Financial uncertainties and cramped living conditions sometimes made her think she should turn back. After a troubled American woman of her acquaintance was arrested for shoplifting and the consul told Ida he could not help because he was busy intervening in a compatriot’s paternity suit, Ida cynically questioned whether women were wise to go out on their own.

  What woman had ever succeeded on her own terms? she wondered. She thought Frances Willard and her colleagues in the temperance and suffrage movements too strident to be held up as positive examples.

  The loneliness, hard work, and poverty she experienced seemed to be signs that she was somehow inadequate. She assumed that men managed more easily. Fred Emery and John Vincent had the comfort and support of their wives. Downer Hazen had natural ability. Ida Tarbell had only her will. Mary Emery was content in the role of wife, was in fact jealous when she thought Ida and other women were too friendly with her husband. Ada Vincent, for all her work copying paintings each day in the Louvre, did not drive herself as Ida did because she had the responsibility and security of John. For Jo and Mary and Annie, Paris was an adventure. They would soon return home and take up their lives. Ida alone wanted something else, but she was without a model.

  Contributor to Scribner’s, assorted American newspapers, and the McClure’s Syndicate, Ida felt she was not so much succeeding as being unnatural. Ambition was a quality that she thought woman should never dare to name or avow. Standing outside, Ida looked into the warm little circle of what women were supposed to be and conjured up the image of domestic bliss they were supposed to enjoy. She had never seen it in the lives of women closest to her, in her mother, her aunt, her sister, or sister-in-law, but she believed that other women had that domestic security, even if she could not.

  In late spring of 1892, her roommates left for home. Ida felt the pang of abandonment, but her spirit grew freer now that she did not live among the hubbub of missing curling papers and girlish pranks. The Johns Hopkins crowd were a decade younger than she, but Ida Tarbell was one of them. Most women of thirty-four would have had children and husbands to tend. Not Ida Tarbell, who in her mid-thirties was enjoying the self-absorption of student days.

  Her lack of service to others created in Ida’s mind a debt to fate, and she awaited calamity to balance the luck. It came one spring night. She had picked up the evening papers outside her door and, as usual, scanned the news from America. “Cloud burst—awful fires—Titusville all wiped out save the depot—150 killed.” Envisioning her entire family clad in their nightshirts clinging to the cupola on the roof, she wondered in horror if she would ever see them or her home again.

  Additional papers provided more harrowing details. Titusville had been hit by both fire and flood. Oil Creek had overflowed its banks and the high waters had dislodged large tanks of flammable materials that ignited. Sixty lives were lost and property damage had been great. After a long sleepless night, she received a telegram. She braced herself against the wall, then let out a shriek as she read its one word—“Safe!”

  Purged of her worst fears and superstitious guilt, she worked with renewed enthusiasm. Having faced the prospect of leaving France to nurse her family, she set about the business of staying and enjoying it with her friends and especially with Downer Hazen. The man she described in letters home as “Mary Henry’s little friend” was growing closer to her, drawn probably by her air of self-sufficiency and her earnest industriousness.

  For her part, the better Ida knew Downer, the more she liked him. He was safe—so much younger, and so inexperienced in the practical world. He had no inkling of the kind of pragmatism she had had to develop during her years at The Chautauquan. She could feel she still had the upper hand. He was too young and naive to try to dominate her or inspire her to confusing emotions. Yet he looked after her when they went sightseeing, and she always enjoyed his conversation, which ranged from gossip to the French Revolution. He agreed that marriage was confining, that one must be free to pursue one’s own path. Twenty-four-year-old Hazen may have inspired her to make this observation about Mme Roland: “A woman who preserves her illusions, her enthusiasms, her sentiments as Madame Roland had up to thirty-eight, rarely finds in a man much older than herself the faith, the disinterestedness, the devotion to ideals, the purity of life and thought which she demands. She is continually shocked by his cynicism, his experience, his impersonal attitude, his indifference. Life with him becomes practical and commonplace. It lacks in hours of self-revelation, in an intimacy of all that she feels deep and inspiring; there is no mystery in it—nothing of the unseen. But with a young man of character and nature like [Roland’s lover] Buzot, she finds a response to her noblest moods, her most elevated thoughts.”17 Now in her thirties, Ida enjoyed youthfulness in a man as much as she enjoyed the mature experience of older men.

  She and Downer Hazen would sit for hours in cafés, she describing Mme Roland’s essays, he talking out his theories on the
French Revolution and insisting on uncomplicated enjoyment of being where they were. They would linger until she insisted that she had to go home, that she had to get up early. But he would gladly have stayed for hours and slept late the next day. They once grew so engrossed in the moonlight on the broken wall of Pierrefonds Castle and tarried so long behind the others that even John Vincent called their behavior improper.

  They spoke of subjects closest to them, of their families and the confinement of small-town life. She could talk to him as she had never spoken to anyone else, because he was from outside her world. For each, Paris had been an escape from their families, however much they loved them. To each other they could speak of the deficiencies and mediocrities of Titusville, Pennsylvania, and Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, places which had permanently molded them, but of which they were never wholeheartedly a part.18

  There was no pretense with Hazen, no keeping up of appearances. He had not come into her mother’s parlor after school nor was he ever likely to appear on the streets of Meadville, and he was intellectually keen and educated. He had her passion for French culture, her avidity to know and understand and transmit knowledge.

  But for Tarbell, tenderness did not kindle into love. She was able to savor a man’s company to the point of giddiness, yet not dream of him when he was out of her sight. She did not worry about his opinion of her, or whether she would see him again. She took what was there for the taking and never fretted about the rest. Peace of mind was perhaps offset by loss of passion, but whether this was a deficiency or an advantage is impossible to tell.

  Thus she was able to console herself when Hazen and the Hopkins crowd left France. Ida planned to get even more work done, but she described herself in a letter as feeling like a tree without limbs, so much of her life was being lopped off. She now lived in the smallest room in Mme Bonnet’s new house at 17 Rue Malebranche. She had lace curtains at her windows, a huge desk, a little closet, and a big velvet chair to hide her garbage pail. She stored provisions on the balcony and only when she craved a beefsteak did she go out for meals.

  To pay for French lessons—for she had redoubled her determination to become fluent now that she had no Americans to talk to—she tutored a young Hungarian baron in English. In letters home she wistfully described a deliberately lonely life—she had cut out larking, she now spent time only with people involved with her work.

  Loss, however, encouraged metamorphosis. The cosmopolitan phase of her Paris adventure began. It arrived in the form of a hatless man in her doorway, breathless from bounding up four flights of steps. He was towheaded and pale, with eyes that caught the color around them and seemed to change from blue to hazel. As he talked, his voice was like scissors, clipping sentences and words and giving urgency to everything he said.

  This was the editor Samuel Sidney McClure. He brought to her serious quarters the scent of action that interested her as library research never could. If he did not change the course of her life, he accelerated it, demanded the best of her, and so energized her that she became not merely competent but a force in journalism.

  They would both always remember this meeting, retell the tale to others such as Guglielmo Marconi, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells over lunch when their magazine was the most prominent forum in America. Years later, when they were both old curiosities of Americana, when they had said and done painful, unforgettable things to each other, they would regale a class of Columbia University history students with the story of that afternoon when they had been young and everything had been before them.

  Samuel McClure, a man meant for the jet age, was imprisoned in a time of steamships. He had things to do, ground to cover, and work to accomplish, all in an instant. His joys were intense, his confidence intense, and his fears, when he allowed himself to have them, were intense too. His nonstop vigor captivated Ida until the day she came to think of it as mania.

  Irish by birth, Sam McClure had come to America as a penniless, fatherless boy of nine with his widowed mother and three younger brothers. Even then his hallmarks were curiosity and restless energy. A friend once told him: “Be idle once in a while! You will be all worn out before you are thirty-five.”19 But he was thirty-five when Tarbell met him, and he felt he was just beginning.

  He had worked his way through Knox College in Illinois where he made friends who helped him seize control of the student newspaper. One of these boys was John Phillips in whose home he encountered something which awed him—a whole stack of magazines. As he was an insatiable reader and quite poor, the Phillips’ ability to stock thirty-five-cent magazines seemed the height of affluence. McClure became almost a part of the Phillips family.

  After graduation, McClure worked his way East selling pots and pans and asking people what they liked to read. He reached Boston, landed a job editing a magazine for cyclists, and hired Phillips to assist him. A year later, McClure moved to The Century magazine and Phillips went to study literature at Harvard and Leipzig. Then McClure started a newspaper syndicate with his wife Hattie as his chief assistant, but once children started coming along—there were four by the time Ida met him—Hattie concentrated on motherhood. When Phillips returned from abroad, McClure met him at the dock with the announcement that they were going to syndicate features to newspapers around the country.

  They started their service, but McClure had dreams of starting his own magazine. In the early 1890s, Scribner’s, The Century, and Harper’s Magazine presided over the publishing scene. They were highly literate and, for those times, lavishly illustrated. McClure wanted to match their quality while treating his readers to lively journalistic style.

  Breakthroughs in the technology of printing made it possible for McClure to realize his dream. The new process of photoengraving and the development of cheap glazed paper allowed publishers to make illustrations from photographs instead of costly drawings and wood engravings. Whereas the august trio of Scribner’s, The Century, and Harper’s charged thirty-five cents an issue, McClure figured he could sweep in and grab readership by asking only fifteen.

  But to Samuel McClure, good writers were essential to a magazine, and in Ida Tarbell’s work he saw the clarity and reportage he had in mind. One day in New York, McClure had seen her article “The Paving of Paris by Monsieur Alphand.” McClure perused it and said, “This girl can write. I want to get her to do some work for the magazine.”20

  When McClure was in Europe, he made a special detour to talk to her in Paris. Confident of her writing skill, he wanted to test her editorial judgment so he asked her to evaluate an article he was planning to publish on the newly discovered, almost otherworldly family legends of the Brontë family. Whatever she said, he approved of both her assessment and the lady herself. He asked her to return to America immediately to help him with McClure’s Magazine.

  He allowed her time to think it over, but he made a final request—could he borrow forty dollars? They had talked past the hour when the banks closed. She quickly gave him the money. Then, after McClure left and the effects of his personality wore off, she told herself she was a fool: he’d never remember to repay her and she would never dare remind him of the loan. But the next day, to her surprise, his London office wired the funds.

  His job offer tempted her. In exactly the time she had allowed herself, she had secured an opening on a magazine, but now Ida wanted more. She was halfway into her book on Mme Roland and refused to give up her long-cherished dream for one more immediate. She wrote her family of McClure’s offer: “It would be a good joke on the Mogul (Flood), wouldn’t it? To go back into an editorial position as good as the one with McClure will be within a year of my scalping? But I shall not do it if I’m going to make this literary business go—if there is anything in me.”21

  She declined his offer of a job in New York, but agreed to work for him as a free-lancer in Paris. Scribner’s editor had also mentioned to Ida the possibility of a future position, but McClure set her to work immediately. Scribner’s represented the scholarl
y pursuits she thought she wanted, but the McClure enterprise promised action and excitement. It would not, alas, deliver the income he promised. Common wisdom said one needed two hundred thousand dollars to found a magazine; McClure and his partner had seventy-three hundred between them. McClure would later say that if they had had fifteen thousand they would not have known an anxious moment, but as it was they knew many, and their inability to pay writers—including Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen Crane—caused Ida Tarbell many unhappy days in Paris. In the heady first months, however, McClure raised her spirits. Her first assignment was to interview the literary women of France, a task that perfectly suited her inclinations.

  Ida had been seeking proof that a woman was capable of doing serious and well-informed writing and in these writers she found it. More remarkably, they demonstrated something she had never seen—women helping each other professionally. Ida wrote home enthusiastically about Thérèse Bentzon: “She gave me all the points for my sketch of her and told me about her friends. Better than that, she took a lively interest in me and asked all about my plans and has promised to introduce me into a lot of places generally sealed to foreigners … It’s a great strike and if she does half she offers to I’m in an El Dorado of opportunity.”22

  Marie Thérèse de Solmes Blanc, a noblewoman who wrote under the name of Th. Bentzon, had been a close friend of George Sand and a lady-in-waiting at the court of Louis Napoleon and was forced to support herself by her pen after an unfortunate marriage. Now fifty-two, obliged to compete with younger writers and fearing she was growing stale, she was embarking on an eight-month tour of America, but before she left she led Ida to other prominent figures.

  One of these was Mlle Séverine, née Caroline Rémy Guebhard, who had created a stir by interviewing the pope. Her specialty was advocacy journalism, and she campaigned for jobs for chosen individuals and funds for the poor. She dismissed criticism of such stunts as the product of envy. Ida quoted her as saying: “Jealousy of a woman’s success is, after gallantry, the most difficult thing a French woman trying to support herself has to bear from the men she meets.”