IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She wrote staccato fashion in her diary: “I might have done better, was sadly conscious all the time that was the end of HJ for us. Am in a funk of soul because there could be no more. We talked a little of Paris, its charm. I know what she says to him. She says it to me too well—that much in common! I told him how I missed him chez Daudet and when he left he said, ‘I hope we shall not miss again.’” Still under the spell of James she wrote: “A great leap and then dull renunciation! Que bon? I am not equal to it. But I deliberately sought another chance to see him. He had asked when I went home. I said I went to Boston and he was—or did I fancy it—disappointed! Ce qu’on veut il voit!”

  James was in New York in mid-June and she wrote to him, but her invitation was forwarded to England. He responded after some months: “Your kind note of so many weeks ago came to me today and in this far place with a ghostly affect. It has apparently had strange postal adventures and languished long in successive pairs of neglectful hands only to give me now a sad taste of lost opportunity … the American adventure is already rather far away and half romantic: that evening at Northampton really and fantastically so … I am sorry not to have had the pleasure of seeing you again and I wish all continued strength to your elbow and glory to your name. Believe me very truly, Henry James.”13

  James was for Ida an ambiguous experience, but Sam McClure and John Phillips continued to be quite real. While Boyden was in Europe, Ida wrote him a letter describing recent events. She was reasonably confident that McClure had tired of Wilkinson: “I know he is not seeing her much—with me too much! We’re doing our best, Mr. P. and I. Poor Mr. P. He comes to dinner with me and we are really getting to be almost easy in each other’s presence! He is certainly the rarest—most beautiful soul on earth … and he has to pay for his qualities in suffering and in loneliness!”14

  Boyden, who knew all about the General’s adulteries, responded, “I’m gladdest of all of course of you and Mr. Phillips warming up. Work on him will be more appreciated than on the chief and it’s quite a necessity from a human standpoint and only a little less so from a business. No one can of course bring Mr. P. present happiness but he doesn’t expect that and each little day of it brings such a beautiful light into that countenance—and you can do more than anyone else, love. I sometimes wish it weren’t so—this always putting it up to you to do everything because you can do it best only piles more responsibility on you who should be freer. But it’s your own fault!”15

  At this point Ida took charge, also, of her niece Esther, just graduated from Wells College in Aurora, New York, and come to New York to be Ida’s social secretary. The young woman was high-spirited, entirely unselfconscious, and the perfect outlet for Ida’s maternal tendencies.

  “Ever since I was a child I went to my aunt for everything. She always gave her strength, her time, her breast pin, anything large or small you asked for, she gave you,”16 Esther said.

  Ida included the girl in all her activities for the three years of her stay. “Social was right,” admitted Esther. “I don’t know about the secretary part.” Jaccaci saw them as a team. “Where you take The General you have to take the Captain too to make her happy,” he said, and invited both of them to share his box at the circus. Esther recalled that the loud guns that punctuated the stunts startled her so that she held her head. “Even through my covered ears I could hear Aunt Ida sternly whispering: ‘Don’t be an idiot.’”17

  Ida “received” on Friday afternoons. As she battled an unreliable chafing dish in the kitchen, she dispatched Esther to entertain the guests. On these occasions, Ida’s efforts to instill decorum proved fruitless. While chatting with the Finley Peter Dunnes, Esther blew a lock of hair away from her face, prompting Dunne to look at her quizzically and inquire: “Did you ever try a comb?” At another time, Ida asked Esther to serve a bottle of wine. “I brought it in by the neck, and my, she lit into me,” said Esther. Formality was apparently not Ida’s strong suit, however hard she tried. Nor was it a noticeable trait among her household. At an elegant dinner party Ida served a fish so delicious that a guest asked what kind it was. The maid Kate piped up, “Sure, Madame, it’s a faymale, I seen the eggs.”

  Sam McClure was also part of their social life. Esther too learned to adapt to his pace. One evening Ida came home early to announce that they were dining with Sam McClure at The Holland House at seven, but she told Esther to be prepared to leave the house at six. McClure arrived at eight and carried them off to Delmonico’s.

  That was, of course, characteristic of McClure under the best of circumstances, but he had a special reason to be distracted at that time. His operation consisted of more than just the magazine, and all were experiencing difficulties. The syndicate was losing money under McClure’s brother Tom, so Phillips and Oscar Brady of the business office had to take it over. The McClure, Phillips & Co. book undertaking had just tied up a quarter of a million dollars for a printing plant in Long Island City. The magazine’s circulation was seesawing. In 1904, it was down by fifteen hundred dollars, then up five thousand in 1905 when it reached three hundred seventy-five thousand; but after that Ayers’ Directory of circulation doubted their figures and sliced their larger claims.

  Disturbed by the rise of other magazines and exasperated by various health cures calling alternately for rest, milk, and squab, McClure gyrated between Europe and New York and between fits of health and exhaustion. His pathologically mercurial moods determined Tarbell’s response. When he was broken and beaten, she was gentle. When he was bravely trying to reform, she was forgiving; but when he was rampant, firing commands and criticism, she rebelled. Once she had seen his peregrinations as quests for new material. Now when she watched him leave the office she was sure he was on the trail of some skirt. She disdained his insights and ignored his urgings that she profile the United States Senate, the body he regarded as the most powerful ruling force in the world and a company of thieves.18

  In this, she made a serious error. Just as McClure had been right about her studying Napoleon and Lincoln, so he was right about this. A year later David Graham Phillips’s series, “The Treason of the Senate,” appeared in Cosmopolitan, raising its circulation and fueling the reform movement for direct election of senators. Meanwhile, Tarbell addressed herself to the task of finishing the saga of Standard Oil in Kansas; and finally, after eight years of sporadic editing, completed work on Carl Schurz’s reminiscences. McClure did not get his own investigation of the Senate, but he dispatched staff writer Burton J. Hendrick to go after life insurance companies, a subject Steffens had pursued unsuccessfully for five months.

  At the very time when McClure seemed to have ended his escapades, he was threatened with blackmail. He was away on one of his trips when Hattie McClure appeared at the office and laid on Ida’s desk “The Shame of S. S. McClure, Illustrated by Letters and Original Documents.” Edith Wherry, the latest discarded mistress, was taking her revenge and terrorizing them all with her “memoirs.” Somehow Wherry was placated and McClure was left free to indulge in his rediscovered pleasure in life insurance scandals, Baker’s series on railroads, and the upcoming Russian-Japanese Peace Conference hosted by President Roosevelt. It seemed as if everything would be all right.

  McClure’s indiscretions were kept as quiet as Tarbell and her colleagues wished. It was their work that garnered all the attention. The History of the Standard Oil Company, at least the story behind it, was adapted—quite freely—for the stage: the image of a woman lacking even the right to vote tackling the world’s largest monopoly inspired The Lion and the Mouse. In it, the heroine, Shirley Rossmore, daughter of a disgraced judge, determines to save her father by exposing the man who has defamed him. She presents herself as a would-be biographer to John S. Ryder, the world’s richest man—the very one who has ruined her father. Happily, Ryder’s handsome son falls in love with her. Most conveniently, he gives her access to his father’s papers. Then, the elder Ryder, at death’s door, begs Shirley to restore her father’s re
putation and to marry his son as well. The New York Times noted on November 26, 1905: “Just as Caesar had his Brutus and George III his Patrick Henry, so Mr. Ryder has his—Ida Tarbell.”

  After seeing the play at the Park Theater in Boston, Ida told the press she found Shirley Rossmore “noble” and was offered the role herself. A few days later at the Wieting Opera House in Syracuse, it was announced that Ida Tarbell would probably star there—for a fee of twenty-five hundred dollars a week for twenty weeks. It was the highest offer ever made an actress, but Ida declined. Instead, she played the part of Lady Macbeth to John Phillips’s Hamlet—she urged him to break away from McClure.

  At the end of 1905, after her articles on Kansas concluded, Tarbell received a confidential letter from McClure. He was sharing with her his greatest plan—the outline for his Universal Magazine. He explained it would be printed on cheap paper and sold at five cents a copy. Furthermore, he decreed it should carry only pen-and-ink drawings as he had decided half-tone engravings were incompatible with type. She objected because it would detract their energies from McClure’s Magazine.

  A few days later, McClure told her he had put together a quarter million dollars in backing. He projected annual income at two million; but besides the magazine, there was to be a People’s University correspondence course, a Universal Library of uncopyrighted classics, a People’s Life Insurance Company, and a People’s Bank. Tarbell would remember these as McClure’s Bank, McClure’s Life Insurance Company, McClure’s School Book Publishing Company, and McClure’s Ideal Settlement.

  It was, of course, foolhardy, and Ida thought the whole notion tainted by greed. McClure’s potential empire probably seemed to him to be an honest alternative to evil trusts; to Tarbell it seemed he was trying to cash in on all the moneymaking schemes they had exposed as illegal.

  The rest of the staff agreed with Tarbell. Lincoln Steffens wrote his father: “Mr. McClure has been away, playing and getting well. He came back to work last fall and he started on a big, fool scheme of founding a new magazine with a string of banks, insurance companies, etc. and a capitalization of $15,000,000. It was not only fool, it was not quite right, as we saw it. It was a speculative scheme, and we protested. He stuck to his idea. He took counsel from financiers who have been exploiting (which means robbing) railroads, and it looked as if he were willing to do the very things the rest of us had been ‘exposing’ … we did not propose to stand by and see it exploited and used, even by the owner.”19

  McClure’s counselors were Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, a man who worked for the establishment of savings accounts through the post office; and McClure’s former Knox classmates Robert Mather and Edgar Bancroft. Bancroft and Mather were both railroad lawyers and directors of banks, a capitalistic mix that did not appeal to the reformers. Tarbell would have no part of them or of McClure’s scheme.

  To it was added the lingering hurt of his philandering and her need for a change. When she started her diary, it seemed she had no place to run. Now seven months later it seemed that if escape was needed, she could flee Sam McClure. Her rupture from The Chautauquan nearly fifteen years before lifted the dead weight of closed opportunities and approaching age. Might she have thought in her innermost self, her “land I’ve never explored,” that the way to rejuvenate herself was to rebel? To give up security and opt, as she had done in her youth, for freedom?

  As Phillips tried to dissuade McClure against the new enterprises, Tarbell rallied Phillips, Boyden, and Siddall more closely about her and cultivated the thought that if McClure prevailed, they could resign. By January 1906, the mutiny was well underway.

  Tarbell approached Finley Peter Dunne about joining them: “I know you would be of great use to us editorially. What I don’t see is just how to work the thing out to your advantage. I think the relations would have to grow; we fumble a lot here in our efforts to keep straight. We are pretty brutal and skeptical with one another but you know us well enough to know that all this is perhaps the unavoidable pain of producing a thing which will really be sane and worthwhile, and the disillusion resulting from nothing ever coming up to our hopes. I believe if we could get down to some kind of a working basis that you would like us and believe in us just as we do in you.”20 Dunne began to give it very serious consideration.

  Soon after writing this letter, Tarbell went on a vacation in the West with John and Jennie Phillips and William Allen White. Rockefeller’s copper interests in Colorado were then coming under scrutiny and reporters importuned them about the subject along the way. White interviewed himself for their benefit and, since Tarbell had no desire to meet the press, White told them to leave her alone—she had left her moral sense back in New York. One newspaper editor contented himself with headlining an article: MISS TARBELL EMPHATICALLY DENIES SHE IS IN COLORADO TO INVESTIGATE COPPER SCANDAL. A Los Angeles reporter thought he saw deeper. To him she seemed like a rock-ribbed Yankee with a typically New England air of potential martyrdom: “She wouldn’t like it, but she would bear her cross.” White impressed him as a man of wide curiosity, but Ida Tarbell seemed “not concerned with a particular thing until she had it impaled on her specimen board.”21

  The vacationing quartet emerged from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to learn that McClure did not take their objections to the Universal Magazine seriously. He was staffing his new corporation and planning to give them all gifts of stock. Stiff from seven hours on mule back and braced by two days of good company and enough spectacular geology to recall the enthusiasm of her student days, Ida poured out her fury in a letter to Boyden. She was wrathful not only over “the diabolical condition in New York,” but at the notion that their errant chief had suggested he might join them in Arizona. She fumed: “These letters make me furious. If anything could prove the General’s inability to found and carry out a new operation it is this. The vital points he does not touch.” By this time the General had figured out a way to incorporate the name McClure into his new projects and Tarbell thought this was an infringement on the magazine she had worked so hard for. She told Boyden: “The use of the name McClure is all wrong—out of the question as I see it. This system of securing the consent of everybody by means of gifts of stock is humbug. I won’t touch it and if he goes on insisting on using the name McC he can take my S. S. McC stock. You see I am not fit to write him. Mr. P. as usual is an angel and has written him a beautiful letter which ought to show him what an inferior creature [he] is but which probably he [McClure] will consider as someway a consent to the scheme. You insist on his coming out here. I have just written you a message saying it would kill us and that I prefer to return. We should simply go mad with him banging away in the face of nature. Besides we will not stay at all if he comes … Don’t let him commit himself any more than possible and urge him to wait until Mr. P’s return. I am sure it can be fixed right then—if not we can secede.”22

  Tarbell drafted a more temperate letter to McClure on her hotel stationery suggesting that if he sold them his stock he would be free to develop other business while they continued McClure’s along the lines he had laid down. They would conserve the old while he perfected the new. If he were determined to leave, they would, of course, sell. She couldn’t believe, she said, that after twenty years they couldn’t settle their differences.23

  As Tarbell took Boyden into her confidence, so Boyden told Siddall. The word passed to Viola Roseboro, Mollie Best, and the rest of the staff. Boyden wrote Baker; someone contacted Steffens; the staff broke into partisan camps.

  By the time the travelers returned to New York, McClure had again gone to Europe, leaving Tarbell and Phillips alone to plan. Phillips was, if not a weak man, an indecisive one, whose strength lay in partnership rather than individual action. For years he had been second to McClure and had been subjected to scorn and abuse. Even Curtis Brady, a McClure supporter, complained of the General: “He never said ‘our’ magazine, he always said ‘my’ magazine.”24

  At long last, Phillips
either had had enough, or had finally found someone more supportive to lean on in Ida Tarbell. Everything that one knows about him indicates it was difficult for him to change his life at the age of forty-five, but once the decision was made, he was serene in his commitment. Indeed, after Phillips told his old chief that he and Ida were resigning, he left most of the frenzy to Tarbell and McClure.

  McClure frantically tried to discuss it with Ida, but she said Phillips would speak for her. She scribbled in her diary: “Persisted only that I didn’t like the whole business [of the insurance company and so on]—the way it had been done—all the crazy features (he seems to acknowledge craziness now).” McClure was dumbstruck to learn that Tarbell preferred Phillips to him. Tumultuous days followed.

  While the principals battled and wept in inner offices, the staff whispered and wept outside. Some vowed loyalty to McClure, others thought the place would be intolerable without Phillips. At first, Boyden was the only one who declared that he would leave. At one point, McClure heard that the entire staff was walking out.

  Trying to understand what was happening, McClure sought out Tarbell. His eyes were red from weeping and she was so distraught that she had to hold his hand. He reminded her of Napoleon at Fontainebleau, although he sounded more like Julius Caesar, saying, “And you, too, Ida Tarbell.” Ignoring her own role, she told him the struggle was not between himself and Phillips, but between Phillips and his own soul, and that to save his manhood Phillips had to leave.