Ida wrote home that she was very pleased with her visit: “I was overjoyed for I have never had a sight of the Master as they call the big men over here. It was in a very pretty room, not very large, that D. was writing his verse for me. He smiled up at me very good-naturedly. He is a little man with a shock of straight black hair which stands out like the new-fashioned dress shirts. His face is pale and his eyes astonishingly black and bright. I think he’s lost two or three teeth and the rest aren’t very good.”
His contribution to McClure’s was: “What will the France of tomorrow be? Will she even have a literature? Everything is to be feared in an epoch when the Academy [to which Daudet was never elected] amuses itself deforming the national orthography; when the high priests of the dictionary threaten to become its murderers.”
Ida was careful to tell her family what he was wearing—“a common black suit which struck me as a little soiled”—for others she spoke with were more eccentric. François Coppée was a poet and playwright with a great, and somewhat simplistic, sympathy for the underdog. When she first called, he didn’t realize she wanted only a quote and tried to get rid of her. She described to her family her tenacity: “I went to see him and he thought I wanted an interview. I hadn’t dreamed of such a thing but as he suggested it, I took my chance quick and said I did. He was awfully busy and danced wildly around me trying to get rid of me without hurting my feelings. He’s been a journalist and hasn’t forgotten what dirty work interviewing is—and I danced around him trying to persuade him that I would love to go away at once—and come back. He gave me a day to return and of course I went.”23
On that day, all prepared, Coppée received her as he sat before a fire in a scarlet flannel working jacket and skullcap. He said he deplored irreligion in France and the proliferation of Protestant sects (such as Methodism) in America. He wrote out a maxim for McClure’s feature: “Give without hope of return; give without knowing who receives; the noblest gesture there is, is to open wide the hand.” Then he insisted she stay on for the interview. It turned out to be one of her most vivid newspaper profiles: she said his total sympathy for the poor sentimentalized poverty and its causes and she called him “puerile” for defending a murderer simply because the victim had a miserable life.
Dumas fils seemed more comfortable with wealth. He greeted her in a gray flannel caftan that reminded her of her nieces’ nightgowns, but his home seemed to her exquisite and the paintings on the wall quite rare. She described his head as “noble,” though his eyes were grave and cold. His solemn quotation was indicative of the man: “It is sometimes painful to do one’s duty. It is never so much so as not to have done it. When man no longer causes the death of his neighbor, and no longer fears it for himself, he will be God. Let us begin by admiring what God shows us; we shall no longer have time to search for what He conceals from us.”
Besides the unquestioned celebrities of her day, Tarbell also called on Zola, whose literary eminence was then in dispute. Her judgment did not fail her here. She pronounced him “the greatest of them all in spite of the bad things they say about him.”
He awaited her in his enormous salon filled with armor, Chinese lacquer, tables, sedan chairs, tapestries, and old carvings. In his simple gray jersey suit, he was nearly camouflaged by the clutter, but the force of his personality impressed her. She described him as “a rather small man, slight and nervous with exceedingly penetrating eyes and an air of great intelligence and quick decisions.”
Zola held forth on his enemies, his realism, and gave broad hints that she should define him as the new Balzac. He glorified battle for McClure’s: “War is the very life, the law of the world. Is it not pitiful man has introduced the ideas of justice and of peace, since impassive nature is only a continual field of slaughter?”
Ida blamed the clutter of his house on Mme Zola: “He married the daughter of a street peddler, I believe, so you cannot expect him to have much help from his wife in an artistic way. He really is to be admired for marrying her though. Most of them do not think of such a thing as marrying the woman they fall in love with. Zola is a good husband too, they say, and very domestic.” It seems Ida was not up on all the gossip. Zola had installed his young mistress and their two small children a few doors away, where, it was true, he was quite domestic.
A few months later, in the spring of 1894, McClure dispatched her to Glasgow to interview Henry Drummond, a Scottish clergyman who had achieved fame for writings reconciling evolution with faith in God and who, in the course of a successful lecture trip to America, invested three thousand much-needed dollars in McClure’s. McClure promised to pay her expenses as long as she traveled third-class and stayed in two-dollar hotels. At the delicious prospect of a free trip to Britain, she threw over her carefully arranged plans and, in anticipation, had her old black silk dress restyled with dotted crepe. She ordered big balloon sleeves that she could detach when she wanted to transform her gown into an evening dress, describing this construction as “a bigger scheme than a combination folding bedstead.”
After France, and a violent crossing which left her stomach tender for days, Queen Victoria’s London in the spring of 1893 seemed discordant and fantastic. Shop windows, women’s dress and the restaurants all lacked the order and taste that had surrounded her in Paris. She was appalled that in London she could not get a cloth napkin in the cheap restaurants she patronized and she found the women’s hats tawdry and awkward. She was amazed to see children running home from school unattended and claimed that the English ate all the time.
On McClure’s allowance she could afford only “vegetarian stuffs” like oatmeal porridge, and wrote home: “As usual, I’m on the ragged edge of bankruptcy and gay as a cricket about it. The McClures are very taken with my work, so they write me. I suppose they can’t find anybody else poor enough to tackle these wretched subjects. I’ve just received a letter saying the magazine is growing … they ask me what I’m going to do the next five or six years and hope I’m not going to get married and thus ‘cut short my career’ (I wish to goodness I was and then I’d have a notion I had a career). I’m only sure of one thing, I’m going to try to borrow or steal enough money to get back to America and see you this summer, then I’m going to finish my book. There! If McClure wants me and has the money he can have me, but it must be for money this time.”24
By the time Samuel McClure joined her, hunger and hard work in the British Museum left her in no mood to compromise. If he wanted her to work for him in New York, he would have to pay for it—especially since he owed her money. When McClure took her to lunch, she ordered the best, deciding he would repay her in other currency than compliments. The duel began. McClure told her that her articles had been praised by “high sources” for their accuracy. She retorted that was like being honored for ability to add. He spoke glowingly of her future, of all she could do for McClure’s, of how they could raise her pay—but this time, however he might charm her, she demanded specific commitments. He was rosy with enthusiasm; she was confident of her moral position and the cut of her restyled dress.
They finally agreed on the following terms: he would pay for her trip to America, providing enough money so that she could replenish her wardrobe and travel decently. She would rest with her family for a few months. Then, in October, she would join his staff as editor of its Youth’s Department. It was a $2100 position, which he promised to raise quickly to $3000.
McClure promised that Ida would be rich in fifteen years, but she knew the publication was nearly bankrupt and expected little for the present—let alone the future. For now, she was sure only that his offer meant going home. She envisioned returning to Paris to live in a high apartment five or six stories up where she could see the sky and hold salons. “Life would be full and satisfying while I cleared up my mind on woman and revolution and continued my search for God in the great cathedrals.”25
McClure sent her money for second-class passage, but she traveled third-class instead, spending the diffe
rence on a porcelain doll for her nieces that with the pull of its string could say “Mama.” The sacrifice was easy for her. Her repayment came when she stood in the doorway of 119 East Main Street in Titusville and the children threw themselves into her open arms. She was home. Paris had given her all she expected and far more than she dared to dream.
Photographs
Ida around age 22 during her year of teaching at Poland Union Seminary in Ohio. Her friend Clara Walker stands under the ornate parasol.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
Ida on the far right with staff members of The Chautauquan. Josephine Henderson is on the far left and Harriet Carter is in the middle. The others are a Minnie Barney (standing) and Minnie Tupper.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
Ida at age thirty-six in London wearing the dress she had styled for transformation into an evening gown.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
Rouseville in the 1860s. The Tarbell home (upper right-hand corner) was on a hillside where, in season, leafy branches could obscure the derricks below.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
At home writing The History of the Standard Oil Company series—behind a desk made neat for the photographer.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
Ida with her mother Esther and sister Sarah at the Titusville home after the death of her father.
The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College.
Ida’s Redding Ridge, Connecticut farm that became the family headquarters.
Ida at age sixty, before she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis.
PART III
SUCCESS
Six
The Americanization of Ida Tarbell
Ida Tarbell invited McClure to call upon her if he needed her during her vacation and he did. She went to work for him, not in October as editor of the Youth’s Department, but in July as biographer of Napoleon Bonaparte.
After the initial joy of being home, Ida’s time in western Pennsylvania had not been a success. She was treated by neighbors with deference for having been abroad, but was expected to do an impossible thing—to confirm that America, especially its women, was superior to Europe in every way.
The Tarbell family fortune, like that of the rest of the country, was at a low ebb. The United States was living in the aftershock of the 1893 “panic” or stock market crash, which was compounded by a long agricultural depression. Early financial failures, especially that of the Reading Railroad, had engendered others until the National Cordage Company, the so-called “rope trust,” went into receivership in May 1893, thus precipitating the panic. In a chain reaction, banks, corporations, and mortgage companies failed. This crisis rippled out to Ida personally in Paris. Since McClure’s creditors did not pay their debts, he did not pay Ida and thus her funds ran so low that she had to pawn her coat.
Titusville also had unique problems with the oil business. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was systematically undermining independents like Franklin Tarbell by undercutting prices. Throughout 1893 and 1894, Rockefeller held the price of refined oil fairly steady while the charge for crude almost doubled. When the cost of business doubled for refiners, they were able to buy less from producers like Franklin, or at least forced to delay payment.
Ida found her father hopelessly looking after his devalued oil leases while her brother Will was active among those who tried to break Standard Oil’s stranglehold by selling oil to Germany. The family mood was grim and Ida felt stifled by it. She missed her life in France and her presence at home did not seem to be of use to the family.
McClure’s hasty summons enabled her to leave this scene. She was delighted by the opportunity to earn money to assist her family and to prepare for her own eventual return to Paris. Ironically, she could have been just as much help to McClure if she had stayed abroad. He had decided to capitalize on the Napoleon craze of the 1890s which marked the centennial of Bonaparte’s victories and he had contracted to publish engravings of the French emperor collected by Gardiner Hubbard of Washington, D.C. Originally a Boston lawyer, Cambridge city planner, and chief backer of the Bell Telephone Company, Hubbard was a man used to having things done his way. McClure had commissioned Robert Sherard, grandson of Wordsworth, to tell Napoleon’s story, but the Englishman’s disdain for “Bony” showed in every line he wrote. Hubbard was furious and threatened to withdraw from the project. In desperation, McClure summoned Ida Tarbell.
Having spent three years in the Bibliothèque Nationale researching the life of the relatively unimportant Mme Roland, Ida was shocked to discover that she was expected to produce the life story of the emperor of the French using only the resources of Washington’s Congressional Library.
Hubbard, wanting no further mistakes, installed her under his own roof where each night he might have the opportunity to discuss the progress of her research. His estate, Twin Oaks, near what would become Dupont Circle, was the finest in the area. Its sloping lawns adjoined those of his two daughters—Mabel (Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell) and Roberta, whose banker husband Charles Bell was the inventor’s cousin.
Washington’s air of comfort and leisure and its stately architecture lent it charm to most eyes: but to Tarbell it seemed raw and unfinished. She found everything distastefully new, sprawling and exposed. Paris had seemed to her like a great sage; the city of Washington was like a man on the make for success, ignorant of his own inadequacies, knowing only where he wants to go.
Sultry as Paris had been the previous summer, Washington was hotter and more humid. Ida worked at a little table surrounded by towers of books and thought of herself as having been placed in the furnace room. Her major satisfaction was convincing the librarian that, though a woman, she was worthy of his help. As the weeks wore on and Ida finished successive installments, McClure appeared and spread galleys and proofs over the floors of the Hubbard study and living room to survey the engravings and decide which should be used. McClure’s visit to Washington added to her discomfort. Painfully conscious of her Paris-worn wardrobe and thinking the sunny Hubbard home the most beautiful she had ever seen, Ida was horrified by McClure’s antics. But when she tried to restrain him, Hubbard’s wife Gertrude replied: “That eagerness of his is beautiful. I am accustomed to geniuses.”
Ida had to learn first how to cope with McClure’s genius for promotion. He knew that The Century, the magazine he regarded as his chief rival because it was the one he most admired, would begin its own series on Napoleon in November, and he wanted Ida’s to run concurrently. To meet his deadline, Tarbell put herself on a war footing. She worked Monday through Saturday in the library and rested Sunday, in order to work more efficiently the rest of the time.
Her recreation was the bicycle, which was then considered a controversial pastime for women, involving as it did the obvious action of limbs. Ida had taken up “the wheel” on New York’s Riverside Drive, encouraged by the magazine staff and Sam McClure. In Washington, she cycled with old friends Ada and John Vincent who had returned to the history department of Johns Hopkins in nearby Baltimore. Since Charles Downer Hazen had gone to teach at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the Vincents brought along their friend Herbert B. Adams to round out the party.
Ida had known Adams slightly when he lectured at the Chautauqua Assembly. With some diffidence she had asked to use him as a reference in Paris and later requested that he show the Assembly to her friend Mme Blanc when she visited the United States.
Adams looked every inch the turn-of-the-century scholar, with a serious smooth face, a big mustache, and center-parted hair. He had taught at Johns Hopkins since its founding in 1876 and numbered among his students
Frederick Jackson Turner, the celebrated historian who wrote on the significance of the frontier in American imagination.
During spring terms, Adams taught at Smith where he could be near his widowed mother. One Smith girl remembered him as being “natural, easy, spontaneous and sparkling” with female students—and a delightful contrast to other male instructors who were often shy in the all-female environment.
In 1894 when Adams pedaled with Ida, he was forty-four, a longtime bachelor some seven years older than herself. Co-founder of the American Historical Society and its first recording secretary, he was particularly interested in local community history at a time when few Americans regarded their early days as worthy of study. Adams was a good friend to Ida for five years until 1899 when he was told he had arterial trouble. His own father had died in his forties, so Adams might well have felt he too was doomed. He curtailed his schedule, passing up a chance to head Amherst College, and died in 1901 just after his fifty-first birthday.1
Judging from the correspondence between Adams and Tarbell, she seemed to have spared little time for their friendship, or for many others, once her career in Washington became more demanding. Always addressing him as Mr. Adams, and called Miss Tarbell in return, she maintained a nineteenth-century formality, but she would apologize for neglecting him, regret that it had taken as long as four months to thank him for a book he had sent, then finish her note with a question about some McClure contributor or to ask for his observations on some point pertaining to her own research.
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