IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She had planned to furnish the house gradually from bargain basement sales, but soon she discovered that one of her neighbors had purchased the contents of many an attic and shed and had set himself up as an antiques dealer. She perused his wares—which he called “teeks”—and discovered an old melodeon, a sort of accordion, whose visual beauty charmed her. Convinced that she could repair the bellows, she put down ten dollars and took it home. Henceforth, she and Esther watched eagerly for days when his horse and loaded wagon pulled up to his shop; they loved to have first crack at his treasures. Tarbell often said she didn’t care about “things,” but her attic allowed her to indulge a repressed love of hoarding.

  Tarbell had fun in the country. She saw a lot of Jeanette Gilder, sister of The Century editor, herself a writer, editor, and critic. A large, strong woman, well-suited to the stout mannish clothes then popular for women, Gilder was masculine enough in appearance that Esther thought it a great joke to see Miss Gilder startled by a mouse and providing a glimpse of silk petticoats in her fright.

  With Jeanette Gilder, Tarbell drove over to see Mark Twain at his villalike home in nearby Redding. He regaled them with stories, such as the time he had tacked up a note advising future burglars that the only valuable item that had not already been stolen was “the brass thing” in the dining room.

  Ida’s country place became The American staff’s weekend retreat. Bert Boyden participated in its maintenance. He took care that appropriate French wallpaper was purchased for the entrance hall and that sufficient food and guest blankets were obtained for the winter. The young Jack Reed was one of her favorite visitors. After Reed graduated from Harvard in 1911, Steffens found him a job at The American. Reed later became a radical journalist and Soviet hero, but the Reed who visited Redding Ridge was a bright, disingenuous young man who thought himself a poet.

  One afternoon, Reed insisted Tarbell come out and see what he had discovered. He sat her on a rock and showed how an adjacent field could be turned into a Greek amphitheater. Reed approached the owner, convinced him to sell, then set about raising funds for the project. Years later Tarbell met a woman who said she had wanted to contribute, but Reed forgot about it all before he could collect.

  In life, Reed did not possess the movie-star aura that Hollywood would later accord him. His friend Max Eastman described his first impression of the man: “He had a knobby and too filled-out face that reminded me, both in form and color, of a potato. He was pressed up in a smooth brown suit with round pants’ legs and a turned-over starched collar, and seemed rather small and rather distracted.”8

  Another frequent visitor to Twin Oaks was John Phillips who came by when he didn’t feel up to making the trip to the Cape to see his family. He continued to voice his befuddlement to Tarbell, even in personal matters. Their camaraderie did not disguise the fact that they were not producing an outstanding magazine. Phillips stopped by to see her once when she was vacationing in Providence, Rhode Island, and she cheered him up while privately sharing his anxieties. She passed hers along to Boyden: “We always have lacked a certain hustle, ingenuity, a general energizing effort such as we used to get out of SS … it’s latent—a genius, and we haven’t it in the staff … JSP sees it. He frets because he is not that kind and that nobody else is. We ought each to be doing a little more—daring something—more experimenting with ourselves—or else have someone that can. We must be discontented, Bert. But I don’t mean unhappy or irritable but not satisfied—eager, pushing, inventive.”9

  An outside writer, William James, provided The American with the attention-getting article Tarbell called for. The eminent psychologist wrote on the phenomenon of “second wind,” the way some persons were able to work through fatigue to tap a hidden level of energy. Readers felt they had at last found the key to Teddy Roosevelt’s amazing vitality and had learned to get more out of themselves as well. The American gave them what would later be called a self-help article.10

  Dunne was writing Dooley pieces and a column of opinion called “The Interpreter’s House.” Baker was filing pastoral reflections called “Adventures in Contentment” under the pseudonym of David Grayson, but Steffens was slow to contribute at all. He was in fact becoming a major strain on Phillips. The American had a smaller purse than McClure’s had had and was less able to tolerate foibles—less able to underwrite them too. Steffens scandalized the staff when his profile of William Randolph Hearst, expected to unmask the newspaper lord as a potential political demagogue, turned into an admiring profile of Hearst’s complexities. After an explosive meeting where Dunne charged that the piece read as if it had been written by Hearst’s own editors, Tarbell, tired of wrangling, gave in to Steffens and closed discussion simply by asking how they should title it.11 The American had hoped to be a forum for ideas. Unfortunately, debate within the office was acrimonious.

  Unlike Baker and Tarbell, Steffens wanted to draw conclusions from the corruption he exposed. The others believed in the American system and the triumph of law. Steffens thought business unsavory by nature and man by nature good. In “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Steffens found his political philosophy, which he thought could be realized through socialism.

  His idealism, along with the practical problems he was causing The American, irked Tarbell severely. She expressed her irritation the day he proposed that they transform The American into a “Socialist organ.” She tartly told Steffens that the magazine had to resist specific ideologies. “The serene young mother,” as Steffens had described the Tarbell who smoothed tempers at McClure’s, was gone.

  Steffens was allowed to investigate San Francisco for several months before Phillips urged him to hand in copy. Steffens replied with exasperation; Phillips countered with reproach. Phillips said hard work had boosted the income of The American, but he charged that Steffens, who had put his wife and mother-in-law on his expense vouchers, received more than anyone in proportion to what he had contributed.

  Steffens’s articles on how San Francisco and the West were improving their governments or reforming themselves appeared regularly after September 1907, but Phillips was growing impatient with long-distance editing and with Steffens’ poorly documented allegations.

  He wanted Steffens to come back to New York and to verify all his facts. Everyone sided with Phillips, even Jaccaci who had been Steffens’s mentor at McClure’s. These days Jaccaci lived abroad, but when he came back for a visit, he saw a change in Phillips and wrote Tarbell: “Why he is a happy man, that poor old friend of ours who used to be so unhappy, kicked, insulted and worried in his heart as in his head … his view of the Steffens matter is perfectly just … I am so glad this single disturbing element is going to be eliminated—it’s too unjust to all the rest and above all to John. What a lunatic that Stef is! Because he has been my friend I trust he is going to get such rough experience as may do him good and save him.”12 In early March 1908, Steffens left the staff.

  He claimed in his autobiography: “I noticed, with some pain, shame and lying denials to myself, that I was going easy. All by myself, without any outside influence, I was being bought off by my own money, by the prospect of earning money. I resigned from The American.”13 He added: “I promised never again to work where my money was.” He was righteous, but the staff thought him unprincipled. The whining, manipulative side of Steffens that Phillips and Tarbell knew was quite different from the public personality who went about marveling over Christianity and, in latter days, Communism.

  When Steffens left, he told them he was in debt and would have to sell his stock. At some inconvenience, four or five shareholders bought Steffens’s common stock for two thousand dollars so that he could survive until he found another job. They felt aggrieved when Steffens’s fortunes quickly picked up. He accepted Edward Filene’s offer to “muckrake” Boston for ten thousand dollars and sold his Connecticut house to industrialist Owen Young at a handsome profit.14

  Ida herself began to feel mounting money pressure
s. Her brother Will was having trouble meeting his debts and frequently turned to her for help, which she gladly provided without asking him to pay interest. Will also began to display certain anger against his employer, the Pure Oil Company. In a February 1908 letter to Ida, he said he wanted to discredit the “figurehead” he had “bolstered all these years.” It is uncertain that such vituperation was justified, but Will did continue to function professionally and he testified as an expert witness in the government’s case against the Standard in 1908.15

  Ida Tarbell’s love for her brother and the financial demands she often had to meet gave her little patience for the radical Steffens. She believed he was simply tired of journalism and was leaving The American because he wanted to play a more direct role in events.

  She herself wanted to influence public opinion only through reportage. The upbeat style of The American was an attempt to reform the country by pointing out what had been repaired rather than what needed to be reformed. Impressed by the way that the city of Chicago took over its streetcar lines from private owners and upgraded service, Tarbell went to Chicago in the summer of 1908 to cover the story. Rather than stay in a hotel, she boarded at Hull House, the seedy mansion Jane Addams had transformed into a vigorous workshop of social change. Tarbell lived as one of the Hull House family, sat in on Ellen Starr’s cultural program that encouraged traditional Old World crafts, and watched Julia Lathrop handle the appeals of mothers who wanted their sons rescued from jail.

  Ida Tarbell did not take a sentimental view of Hull House. She saw that Addams had a unique way of harnessing strong personalities: “She’s so kind. That’s really what had made Hull House. Her gentleness with everybody. Of course she’s got so much sense, and so considerate—the way she’s held all that gang, selfish and inconsiderate and opinionated, and also some awfully nice people.”16

  Addams was the only woman of that time who equaled Tarbell in public stature. The writer may well have felt subtle competition with this round little woman who had accomplished so much by maximizing her nurturing qualities instead of denying them. Addams’s inspiration had been Toynbee Hall in the slums of East London where humanitarian work was done for the poor. Tarbell had heard of it around the same time Addams did. She had read everything she could about it and as an editor brought it to the attention of Chautauquan readers, but Addams went out and founded Hull House.

  Tarbell was struck by the way Addams, who was so militant in her fight against injustice, would go through the house tenderly straightening chairs and dusting knickknacks. Some months after her stay, Tarbell sent a belated thank-you present and a letter that described how she herself was trying to help immigrants who were farming Connecticut. She told Addams she had been writing at her country home: “Of course I’ve been working—that maudit traction [Chicago transportation] problem has been bothering me but I’ve got it off at last and am at other things. So far I have been able to do my work mainly here in the country—six miles from a locomotive and not from a beefsteak. I like it. I fear you wouldn’t, and yet I don’t know, there are plenty of opportunities for service even here. Within six days I’ve had one case of hysterics, two wounds, one bad cold, one moral overthrow and two sick horses to doctor and I’ve brought them all through! As for social problems, why I’ve got the most wonderful cases of the absorption of foreigners you ever saw … I am sending a sample of one of our chief products. We raise three things up here—rock, battered mahagony and stained pewter. I’m sending a specimen of the last and I shall be proud if you will include it in the Hull House collection.”17

  Tarbell so enjoyed her quip about distressed pewter that she repeated it to many correspondents. Characteristically tardy with personal correspondence, Tarbell was exceptionally slow to thank Addams because she was preoccupied by the health of her mother and sister. After leaving Hull House, Tarbell stopped off in Titusville and found Esther, aged seventy-eight, close to death from a sudden illness, and Sarah overcome with anxiety. Tarbell sent Esther to a sanitarium and brought Sarah home with her.

  Sarah bore most of the responsibility for Esther, but Ida tried to help. Most summers she invited her mother to Redding Ridge. During these visits Esther undoubtedly told Ida how to manage her garden, her animals, and most certainly her hens, for Ida had been fascinated by her mother’s talent for raising poultry. During her Chautauquan days it inspired a never-completed short story and was the subject of much correspondence when she was in Paris.

  Ida tried to give Esther treats, especially after Franklin Tarbell’s death. Once when Esther was in New York, Ida told her to dress up, and without telling her where they were going she took her to see Shore Acres, James Herne’s realistic drama about a homespun New England philosopher. As Franklin had frowned on the theater, the performance was a revelation to Esther. “My mother sat through it, enjoying it like a child,” Ida recalled. When Ida asked Esther if she’d like to go again, the old lady replied, “I suppose it’s wicked, but I would.”

  Later, as Esther convalesced, she passed time by playing solitaire. Sheepishly, she told Ida that Franklin would not have approved. Ida noticed that Esther not only played the game—she adroitly cheated at it.18

  Tarbell’s preoccupations were her family and The American Magazine, but Sam McClure continued to seek a place in her affections. His magazine had weathered the defections of his closest associates, but he still felt abandoned. Tarbell’s correspondence shows that McClure called on her so late one night that she had declined to see him, but she agreed to meet him for breakfast at the Waldorf. Then, in July 1907, McClure wrote that he was “starved” for her: “I dreamed of you. I thought I was telling you how I found out that by speaking slowly & calmly & acting calmly I found I had much greater influence on people (I am actually doing this) & I thought that I was standing by your chair & you drew me down & kissed me to show your approval. When you disapproved of me it nearly broke my heart …”19

  Their break was irrevocable, although in time Tarbell could again think of him with affection. She concentrated on current projects and The American. She would do two significant series for the magazine. Her work on the protective tariff was so important in clarifying the issue, in arraigning its profiteers and tracing its cost to consumers, that she was invited to sit on the Tariff Commission. The second, on the American woman, opened her to ridicule and the repudiation of all she herself had become.

  The tariff was, like the trust, a key issue of the day. One question was whether free trade between nations made goods more affordable to the consumer or jeopardized American business. Western Republicans and reformers of both parties, those who were establishing themselves into a force called Progressivism, insisted that the tariff fostered monopoly.

  The controversy was a maze of rhetoric, greed, and statecraft befogged by myth. It was certain that before income tax was levied in 1913, the tariff was the greatest source of federal revenue, but dissension arose over who should pay it. In the early days of the nation, the tax had been promulgated to nourish fledgling native industries centered in New England and to discourage an influx of British goods. The manufacturing North and agricultural South were in such disagreement over the tariff that the debate, with a push from the question of slavery, split the Union. Afterward, manufacturers wanted to keep out cheap foreign machinery, whereas farmers, who wanted economical equipment, suggested a tax on raw cotton from abroad. Around 1905, largely because of what they read and heard, people began to believe that duties on beef, sugar, tin, and iron protected big firms such as Armour & Company, Havemeyer’s sugar refineries, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil, and not young industries. Moreover, they realized the public paid the price. That which had been intended to raise revenue for the Republic was now seen as the pelf of a few and an obstacle to competitive capitalism. Tarbell was eager to tackle the issue.

  “What had particularly aroused me was the way tariff schedules were made, the strength of what we now call pressure groups—the powerful lobbies in wool and cotton and i
ron and sugar which for twenty-five years I had watched mowing Congress down like a high wind … but it looked in 1906 as if the Day of Judgment was near, and I asked nothing better than to be on the jury.”20

  The series opened in December 1906 with a history of the tariff during the Civil War. Thereafter “The Tariff in Our Times” alternated with Tarbell’s articles summing up Roosevelt’s battle with the Standard Oil Company and short stories based on legends she had heard in her girlhood or during her biographical research.

  Tarbell often remarked that her research habits reminded her of the white actor who, before he could play Othello, had to blacken himself all over. So it was with the tariff. She checked every rate schedule and read every Congressional Record, pamphlet of reform, and relevant book, particularly classic texts by F. W. Taussig and Edward Stanwood. Then she wrote or interviewed congressmen, attorneys, trade spokesmen, and manufacturers who had worked on tariffs. Congress emerged from her investigation as the tool of special interests.