IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  McClure had another reader at this time who also wrote for them. His name was Frank Norris, but he didn’t stay long. With McClure’s blessing, and faithful salary checks, Norris went home to San Francisco to write The Octopus, a realistic tale of California farm life that became an American classic.

  Roseboro also published some short stories, but her stronger talent was for detecting the talent of others. A one-time actress whom McClure hired to read manuscripts, Rosie lugged home a suitcase full of them each night and kept two barrels of unsolicited work by her desk. From these she plucked the work of a convict who called himself O. Henry and bought it for the syndicate. Ida allowed her to publish his “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” the first month of her editorship, not knowing that McClure had already rejected it.

  Ida respected Roseboro, but was put off by Roseboro’s hand-rolled cigars and the coarse Anglo-Saxon words she exhaled with the smoke. Ida was friendlier with Mary Bisland who oozed New Orleans charm. Bisland had worked her way up from health and women’s pages—penning such stories as “Is Coffee a Food?”—to a post on the syndicate. She dressed beautifully, scolded Ida for her lack of vanity, and lured her out of the office to try on hats. Tarbell once confessed: “The first time I paid the [exorbitant sum of] twenty dollars for a hat was due to Mary Bisland. I was spoiled for bargains after that.”50 Yet for all her friendship with Bisland, she trusted Rosie’s rambunctious bluntness more.

  The newest addition to the staff at that time was young Albert Boyden, twenty-three and fresh from Harvard. McClure saw that this dark-haired youngster had a way of keeping everyone cheerful and soon made him production manager so he could jolly editors, writers, and printers into meeting their deadlines.

  Ida helped familiarize Boyden with the routine and he caught on so well that soon Tarbell handled only callers and correspondence. Even if he had not been personable, she would have noticed him for the sake of his brother-in-law, John Finley. Finley had worked on The Chautauqua Assembly Herald one summer during Ida’s tenure and later became president of Knox College, alma mater of Phillips and McClure. Finley went to the McClure’s organization with the expectation that McClure would buy Harper’s Weekly and make him its editor. When that plan faded, Finley took a teaching post at Princeton, became president of the College of the City of New York, and then editor in chief of The New York Times.

  Boyden, eighteen years younger than Ida, quickly moved from the status of neophyte to confidant and sometimes passed secrets of the magazine’s inner circle out to the clerks. He had great empathy for women. As a Harvard classmate noted: “His friendships with girls had that unusual touch which marked his relations with womankind through his whole life, and they were altogether free from the element of romance … There was nothing effeminate about Bert—far from it—yet there was in his make-up something rare among boys and men, a certain sympathetic interest and understanding in all the feminine preoccupations and refinements of life which made him as much at home in the feminine atmosphere as the girls themselves.”51

  Tarbell took Boyden under her wing. When he wanted his first roommate to move out, she gave him the courage to break the news. She practically badgered Boyden into taking his first trip to Europe and, with the McClure gang, saw him off and welcomed him back. He became McClure’s social director; once his pay increased, Bert and his second and permanent roommate, the Reverend Maitland Bartlett, hosted weekly dinners. No one minded climbing the four flights to their apartment on Stuyvesant Square. One guest recalled: “If [they were] afternoon affairs, there would be gay songs, monologues and imitations … but it was to Bert’s dinners we looked forward to most, dinners alive with discussion of men, affairs and books …”52

  The two bachelors served an unvaried menu that included creamed potatoes and cheese, but the food was not important. Talking was a favorite activity for the whole group, but as time passed, Boyden prevailed upon Ida to join him in a cakewalk and other dances as they became the rage.

  Ray Stannard Baker left the best physical description of Boyden in noting that his smile was half-ironical and his gestures often self-deprecating. “He was always eager, hurrying, expectant, happy.” Baker recalled that Boyden would accept a manuscript with compliments, rush it into print, and return chastising Baker for not understanding the mechanics of putting out a magazine.53

  Ida Tarbell seemed to rely on the young Boyden as much as she once trusted the young Downer Hazen. Hazen still wrote to Ida, often in melancholy moods: “Fortunately, you are the one woman I have known to whom one doesn’t have to explain things. You take things like a man as they come without seeking for arrière-pensées [ulterior motives] and without endless analysis. Que Dieu vous bénisse!“54

  One can only wonder how Tarbell received the news, shortly after her forty-third birthday, that Hazen was to marry a twenty-eight-year-old Smith graduate: “The worst has happened and your faith in me is severely tested. I am engaged to Miss Sally Duryea of New York. We are not going to announce our high-handed action just yet but I am writing you in confidence because I wish you to know … Really, Miss Tarbell, I was never in as buoyant and gay a mood as I am now, never as deeply satisfied with the world and all it contains. Only a long series of remarks made to you during the last ten years somewhat hampers my freedom of utterance now, another instance of the tyranny of the past on us.”55

  She did not have much time for regret. McClure’s and New York were the hub of her life. Witter Bynner, the poetry editor and also a poet, described the Ida Tarbell of this time as “firm as the Statue of Liberty and holding up the lantern of integrity.” He said: “Whereas S.S. was the motor, the galvanizer of the staff … Phillips and Ida were the control, especially Ida. I can see her still, sitting there and gravely weighing prospects, possibilities, checking errors, smoothing differences. Her interest was mainly factual and moral, rather than literary. She respected Viola’s management of the fiction and mine of the poetry under the final say-so of the Chief, but she hadn’t the inclusive interest he had in everything we printed. Her concern was honest information and salutary direction. Every fiber of her was firm and true. The rest of us tided around her. And this was not only in matters of magazine policy or contents. It was in personal matters too. She was pacifier and arbiter, guide, philosopher and friend.”56

  Ida Tarbell was not writing very much in those days, but waiting for this woman who had cut through the mystery of Lincoln was an important mystery of a very different kind.

  Seven

  Lady of the Muckrake

  McClure’s Magazine had been too dispirited by the end of the nineteenth century to take much joy in the start of the twentieth. The new era saw many changes in the magazine, particularly in terms of its personnel. Phillips was absent several months recovering from exhaustion, Jaccaci moved to Europe. Albert Brady, wizard of McClure’s business office, died, and McClure, his energy turned to mania, was in France under a physician’s care.

  Ray Stannard Baker noted: “For most members of the staff, long continued overwork, nervous tension and excitement had begun to extract the price of high-flown ambition and swift success.”1

  The group was under continuous pressure to come up with a circulation-boosting series to meet the boast, “The keynote of McClure’s is human interest, the record of human activities.” John Finley believed he had found just such a subject. McClure was in agreement and wrote to Phillips: “It seems to me that he has found the great feature, and the great feature is Trusts … As the Silver Question excited America during the last Presidential campaign. That will be the great red-hot event. And the magazine that puts the various phases of the subject that people want to be informed about will be bound to have a good circulation …”2

  McClure himself had addressed the topic before. In early 1890, his syndicate offered a variety of legal and philosophical opinions as to whether or not trusts were legal, and who derived the most benefit from them. Now the time seemed right for the magazine to do an incisive artic
le.

  During 1900, a prosperous year for America, Tarbell, Phillips, and others in New York debated how to show an industry passing from ownership by the many to control by the few. The editors felt that one trust, properly treated, could illustrate the pattern of all others. But which one?

  Ida suggested a study of how the Sugar Trust influenced tariff legislation, which in turn affected the price paid by the housewife, but McClure thought that too trivial. The Beef Trust might have become their target, but Philip Armour did himself the favor of dying in January 1901, thus removing a living person on whom to target the exposé. When a letter from Ray Stannard Baker suggested a story on the discovery of oil in California, Tarbell replied:

  “Unquestionably we ought to do something in the coming year on the great industrial developments of the country, but it seems clear to me that we must not attempt to do this by describing the discovery and opening of great natural resources such as in the case of the oil. We have got to find a new plan of attacking it. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources.”3

  The result was Baker’s article “What the U.S. Steel Corp. Really Is,” in November 1901, describing J. Pierpont Morgan’s company as a government unto itself. Still, McClure’s sought something with more impact. In discussions with Phillips, Tarbell offered more vivid examples of the direction the trust article should take. She told him how her father first prospered in the oil business and then was crushed when the monopoly took hold, and how townspeople rose up against the Standard and made revolution seem a sacred thing. As she talked, her own interest in the project quickened. She had once tried to novelize Pithole’s boom; now at last it occurred to her that she might treat the story as a documented historical narrative. She grew convinced it could be done, but doubted anyone would care to read it. Phillips prodded her to produce an outline and take it to Sam McClure in Europe.

  She sailed in September 1901, a few weeks after McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency. She expected to stay with McClure only a week, but her visit stretched on. She and McClure usually managed to have fun together as well as working hard. This was fine with Hattie McClure, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and thought Tarbell had a stabilizing influence on her husband. In fact, Sam McClure had a liberating effect on Ida. Sam McClure was expansive, oversized, and full of ideas for excursions. Once he had her help him collect a thousand neckties in Paris and London. No one can know precisely what was between them. Physical passion seems not to have been Ida Tarbell’s style. Most likely, their relationship had the character of courtly love—chaste veneration for the unavailable. Only in this case it was McClure, wed to his college sweetheart long before they met, whose marriage safely limited their involvement.

  Tarbell carried her outline for the Standard Oil series to Vevey, Switzerland, where McClure was taking a rest cure. Not unexpectedly, he seized upon her arrival as a chance of escape. He whisked Ida and his wife to Lucerne, the Italian lakes, and Milan before he would talk business. At the spa of Salsomaggiore Terme in Italy, in an area fringed by oil refineries, they baked in mud, basked in steam, and chatted with Cecil Rhodes. At last, McClure approved her proposal of a three-part, twenty-five-thousand-word feature on Standard Oil.

  Research, Ida assured McClure, would be a simple task of reviewing and verifying amply documented findings of governmental investigations. In 1872 and 1876, congressional committees had probed the Standard. In 1879, investigators scrutinized it in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In 1891, an Ohio judge dismantled the trust, whereupon the Standard relocated its headquarters from Cleveland to Bayonne, New Jersey. Tarbell expected to find in the mass of records various charters and agreements by which Standard operated and the testimony of participants in the events. She thought that in a library she could explore the labyrinth that was the Standard Oil Company and map its workings and its plan.

  Tarbell professed that she began her work with an open mind. In fact, she said that she was not sure that John D. Rockefeller had done anything illegal. However, she did know the effects he had had on her own family. Franklin Tarbell had been forced to mortgage his home, something he thought tantamount to defiling it. There were people in the town, old friends and business associates, to whom the Tarbells no longer spoke because they had sold out to the Standard, and there was in the Tarbell house the taint of things having gone wrong, promises not kept and hard work not rewarded.

  The psychic toll of the Standard was easy to perceive, but about the company itself she knew very little. Informing herself was harder than she expected it to be. Key documents had disappeared. Titusville neighbors whom she thought would help either feared or distrusted her. Those who sold out to Rockefeller at a handsome profit wanted no further trouble. Those who held out against him still feared what he would do. Her father warned she was jeopardizing McClure’s. “Don’t do it, Ida,” he advised. “They will ruin the magazine.”

  She dismissed as nonsense all warnings that the Standard would kill or maim her because she knew that if she suffered an accident the Standard would immediately come under suspicion. Finally, she saw that the Standard was indeed aware of her project. One night at a dinner party given by Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, Frank Vanderlip, one of the capital’s most popular bachelors and vice-president of the Rockefeller-controlled National City Bank, called her into an anteroom. He told her plainly that his bank looked with concern at what she was doing. She was stunned at this tacit financial threat against the magazine, and the implicit threat that she was being watched. “Well, I am sorry,” she said, before they rejoined the other guests, “but of course that makes no difference to me.”4

  The Standard did not move directly against her, but Henry Demarest Lloyd did. A decade before Lloyd had written Wealth Against Commonwealth, which vilified the Standard. Lloyd was the classic penniless boy who had made good. He married his sweetheart, the daughter of his boss, and was able to live out his days as a sincere and comfortable reformer.

  Ida had read his book in Paris when her English friend H. Wickham Steed gave her a copy, but she rejected Lloyd’s work as a strident argument for socialism, a system she thought more idealistic than practical. “As I saw it,” Tarbell later recalled, “it was not capitalism but an open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists which lay at the bottom of the story Mr. Lloyd told so dramatically.”5

  Lloyd’s theme had been the malevolent power of wealth. He focused on the Standard to illustrate his arguments, but he did not name it. Tarbell intended to be crisper in her presentation, to go straight to the heart of the story and to tell nothing that could not be proven. She also intended to ask Standard Oil to comment on her findings. This was simply sound journalism, but Lloyd heard about it and warned independents that she had been taken in by Standard Oil. He wrote key people in the oil regions entreating them to avoid Tarbell.

  Tarbell, who had coaxed material about Abraham Lincoln from backwoods strangers, could not understand why she could not convince her old neighbors to help her. “It was a persistent fog of suspicion and doubt and fear. From the start this fog hampered what was my first business, making sure of the documents in the case,”6 she said.

  She made a particularly rigorous search for a pamphlet called The Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company. Compiled in 1873, it detailed the exposure and dissolution of the company, which had colluded with railroads to obtain rebates (refunds of its own shipping costs), drawbacks (payments from competitors’ shipping fees), and illegal information about its rivals’ shipments.

  No charge was as damaging to the Standard as the accusation that it had grown from the South Improvement Company; Rockefeller always disavowed that he had anything to do with so predatory a scheme. Some insisted that
the thirty-year-old document Tarbell sought verified that the Standard had in fact risen from South Improvement’s ashes, but all copies had mysteriously disappeared. Reportedly, the Standard had purchased and destroyed them all.

  The forces suppressing The Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company had not reckoned with the New York Public Library. After Tarbell gave up on Titusville’s archives, she applied there and at last discovered her treasure. Its 126 pages of closely-spaced type disclosed a crucial bit of testimony: a John Alexander, asked by a congressional investigator if he sold his refinery to South Improvement, replied, “To one of the members, as I suppose, of the South Improvement Company, Mr. Rockefeller; he is a director in that company; it was sold in name to the Standard Oil Company, of Cleveland, but the arrangement was, as I understand it, that they were to put it into the South Improvement Company.”

  Thus for the first time, Ida could prove that Rockefeller was a linchpin of an illegal ring whose tactics he transferred to the Standard Oil Company.

  Evidence showed that John D. Rockefeller had purchased the charter for South Improvement from an estate in 1871 and had asked everyone involved to sign a pledge of secrecy. The charter, a license to operate in the state of Pennsylvania, was quoted in the pamphlet. It granted Rockefeller’s group powers of such force and dimension that oilmen felt thoroughly justified in calling it an octopus: “The South Improvement Company could own, contract or operate any work, business or traffic (save only banking), may hold and transfer any kind of property (real or personal), hold and operate on any leased property (operate in any state and territory). Its stockholders, directors included, were liable to the amount of their stock only.”