IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Ada showed signs of being jealous of Ida’s niece and nephew. One of Ida’s main reasons for going to Tucson was that it would be relatively easy for her to see Scott’s new home. This visit cut into Ida’s hours with Ada, and when the time came for Ida to go, Ada protested that the trip would be much too strenuous. There was some truth to this, of course. On her three-hundred-mile bus journey back from Scott’s ranch, however, Ida was thrilled by a sandstorm and blizzard that terrified the other bus passengers; but she later confessed that the trip had brought on a recurrence of hemorrhoids and she took aspirin with a little whiskey to sweat away a cold. She said with some pride: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I am much stronger than other women my age.” Ada wrote Phillips, of whom she had heard through Ida and Viola, complaining that Ida was overtaxing her strength.

  Ida had barely recovered from her exertions on behalf of Scott when her niece Clara Tarbell Tupper arrived. Clara was now living in the Hollywood area where her husband had taken a job as a screenwriter, and her visit to her aunt was undertaken partly to tell her gently that she was getting a divorce. After Ada heard the news, she chattered about how she herself had worked for stronger divorce bills. Ida wept bitterly over Clara’s news and grew enraged over Ada’s intrusions, later warning Ada: “I wasn’t as mad as I could be. I was outraged at the indignity. I will not be bossed by anyone. I’d given you plenty of hints before. You drove me simply wild fussing over me. I will not stand it.”6

  Aggrieved by Ida’s independence, Ada said, in Clara’s presence, that Ida kept promises to everyone except herself. Ida shouted, “Never again will I mix business and friendship … the longer I stay here the harder it is for me when I get back to New York. I have to keep in with my editors. There are young women pressing in on me all the time.” She added that her brother was always terrified that she would never come back whenever she stayed away too long.7

  After Ida left for home, Ada wrote in her notes: “It wouldn’t have killed her to mother me that last morning, meaning baby that I am that if I could have tumbled into bed beside her and put my head against her warmth, that it would have comforted all this soreness out of my heart. I didn’t mean that I never got into bed with her when she was having breakfast but it was always as remote as a street parade and twice I did early when she was half awake, but unwelcoming.…” McCormick recorded their dialogue thus:

  Ida: “I’m not used to a bedfellow. You ought to learn to sleep.”

  Ada: “I never sleep much without Fred.”

  Ida (rather irritably): “Well, you ought to be with Fred.”8

  Finally, accepting that what mattered to Ida was Ida’s family, Ada took Ida’s grandniece Ella, who was in college in Tucson, under her wing. Starting in 1933, when her magazine income began to dwindle, Ida allowed Ada to lend her money. Tarbell wrote a promissory note stating that she would repay a thousand dollars a year at six percent interest, but when she fell behind, she said Ada would be repaid from her estate after she died.

  Ada sent checks to Scott’s children; then, as a counterweight to her generosity, she kept all the cancelled checks and headed a ledger sheet on the matter “Finances and gratitude.”9

  Ada McCormick was buying attention, helping a friend, and assuring indebtedness both emotional and financial. But she was also a real help to Ida who once said that Ada had been the first security she’d experienced since she left her job at The American Magazine. “You’ve cushioned my life a little, which isn’t always easy materially, and given me the feeling of someone who cares man to man. I’m not one for hero worship.”10 The quotation is from Ada’s papers, but they have the sound of Tarbell.

  Once Ida was back in New York, she spent her strength as carefully as she spent her money and she made some adjustments. Instead of popping out of bed at seven as she once had, she luxuriated until seven-thirty, musing about the day. As she made her breakfast—a single cup of coffee—she flexed her ankles, touched her toes, did a little limbering dance. Around eleven, her secretary, Thelma Wolfe, arrived to type, handle mail, make the little black bands which held Ida’s eyeglasses, and see that Ida’s sash was properly tied if she was going out to lunch. At the beginning of each season, Ida asked Thelma Wolfe’s opinion of her hats. She tried each on, asked if it were fashionable, sorted her stockings, and straightened her dresser drawers.

  Ida’s evenings were quiet. She had a low opinion of the cheap fantasy of most movies, but she loved Disney cartoons. She devoured two or three detective stories a week—Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley and Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night were two of her favorites—but she often read and reread Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own” which was a testimony to woman’s struggle.

  Distress over money surpassed her natural reticence. Paul Reynolds had urged her for several years to write her life’s story before she finally signed Macmillan’s contract in October 1935. She begged Viola Roseboro to protect her from herself: “It nauseates me to take off my clothes—just the upper garments—in public. Please take on the job, dear Rosie, and don’t let me say anything that is silly.”11

  Tarbell, who shrank from self-examination, decided that hers would be an “external” biography, disclosing as little as possible of her inner life. But as she began reminiscing, idealized memories of her childhood flowed into her Dictaphone. By now a mistress of armchair research, she wrote to the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress to find out when The Police Gazette was reduced to a smaller format so she could figure out the date (it was October 19, 1867) when she and Laura Seaver had indulged their innocent orgies of pubescent curiosity. While in Meadville attending a trustees’ meeting of Allegheny College, she looked around for her old landmarks. The Chautauqua building had been turned into an auto dealership and Flood’s house had been torn down.

  Writing her autobiography was like cleaning some closet of her heart, discovering deep recesses that yielded both treasure and debris. She was surprised to realize how different she was from the Ida of 1880 or 1910. Whole years seem to have disappeared: “The strangest thing to me as I attempt to review my past is the long strips of my life through which I passed of which there is apparently no memory in my mind, nothing that I see, nothing that I hear, nothing that I felt … ’ she observed in her notes.

  She remembered her debt to Robert Walker of Poland, Ohio, and devoted several pages to defending him against charges that he had ever duped William McKinley. By now, her old friend Clara was in a nursing home in Ohio. Tarbell was anguished that her brother’s presence at Redding Ridge made it impossible for her to help Clara.

  However much it cost her to dredge up her past, according to her correspondence, her publisher was not pleased with her mellow memories. “Macmillan wants more sensationalism,” Tarbell wrote Roseboro, “but even though I’m in debt I won’t do it. I’ll send it elsewhere.” Phillips agreed with this stance, but Roseboro noted that Ida’s first draft had not even disclosed such harmless intimacies as the fact that she had played with dolls or that she had had any siblings. In response, Tarbell wrote: “I had a brother who died, but I fear that mentioning him cuts too deep.”12 Under Viola’s prodding, one doll, Frankie, Jr., Sarah (to whom the book was dedicated), and Will were added to the story of her life.

  Possibly because she was reserved about personal relations, she at first omitted John Phillips. When he read her draft and discovered this, he was quite hurt and said so. Her letter of apology was abject. She said she had lain awake all night fretting that he had lain awake worrying over it. “Why did I ever get into this?” she asked him. “Money of course. Money I couldn’t refuse when I found out what the price was like.” She indicated one of her chapters would be “How I Discovered JSP.” That chapter did not appear, but he was given credit and praise whenever possible.

  Ada McCormick was not mentioned at all. Tarbell assured her that this book would be the story of a working woman’s outside life, and said that if she did not live to finish it she wanted
Ada to have the notes and outlines—with the hope that her royalties would cancel all debts.

  Ada McCormick caught wind that a book of recollections was in the offing. She wrote to a Macmillan editor that Ida was the support of her brother, nieces, and grandnieces (which was somewhat an exaggeration), and said she hoped her letter might be the introduction to Ida’s book. Later, McCormick wrote the same news to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a popular writer who was a member of the Pen & Brush Club that Ida still headed; and so news of her financial straits reached new ears.13

  Tarbell had hoped to serialize her book, but few offers came. Edward Weeks of The Atlantic Monthly had asked for an early look at her manuscript, but declined it in a letter as brutal as it was honest. He explained that All in the Day’s Work lacked humor; that her characterizations, because they were uncritical, were bland; and he said that he found she was not a nimble writer. Tarbell took this in good spirit. She answered that she had not sent him a finished manuscript and hoped she would profit from his criticism.14 She did enliven her memoirs, but it was by no means a spicy tale. It was a straightforward, unassuming book in which modesty shadowed the real achievements of her life. In it she professed to believe that however beleaguered the world might be, a good night’s sleep was the antidote to cynicism.

  Time had rendered the past benign, but the present still proved to be treacherous. From Viola Roseboro, Ada learned the names of Ida’s friends. In November 1936, Ada decided to inform Anne Morgan about Ida’s finances, and suggested they take up a collection. Morgan replied that she doubted that Ida would apply their money to her personal needs. Ada rejoined with a sordid description of Ida’s situation. That was enough for Morgan, who responded angrily that Ida was “fine and sensitive” and that contributions on a group basis would shame her deeply.

  Privately, Morgan then set about to help Ida in a manner that would allow her dignity. Two months later Tarbell was thrilled to receive a contract from Pathé Film Company, which asked her to serve as historical consultant for a film they were doing on the history of the oil business. Anne Morgan, who had proposed the idea, acted as Tarbell’s agent.

  In these days, Ida Tarbell’s hand often shook so violently that it rendered her Dictaphone useless. She could no longer hold the microphone steady. Once she was able to control her shaking hands in public by clasping them. Now she sat on them. Not satisfied with the explanation that such infirmities were the result of old age, she began to research palsy and found out about Dr. Henry Parkinson and the disease to which he had given his name. When she confronted her doctor Harlow Brooks, who had kept her ailment a secret from her in an attempt to be kind, he confirmed her diagnosis, but also predicted that she would probably live a hundred years. Far from feeling reassured, she wondered how she would ever be able to support herself.

  Soon after that, her ramrod posture failed and she would find herself pitching forward. Instead of walking, she jerked herself along with crab-like movements. Other Parkinsonian symptoms—restlessness, fatigue, depression—just blended with the typical conditions of old age.

  Family illnesses threw the Tarbell siblings into panic. Will was deeply wounded when he learned Ida had Parkinson’s disease. When he tried to express his gratitude for her help, she cut him off, unwilling to let him acknowledge that she supported him.

  As much of a burden as he was, Will was very dear to Ida. When he suffered a heart attack in early 1934 and snow-packed roads hampered efforts to get him to a Bridgeport hospital, Ida was so overwrought that she had to stay with Sarah for several weeks until word came that Will would recover. Of them all Sarah, who had always been the sickliest, was the most matter-of-fact about illness, although she too experienced the breaks and strains of old age.

  On November 5, 1937, Ida Tarbell was eighty years old. The out-pouring of affection in response to her birthday totally amazed her. It took her and her secretary two days to open all the letters and arrange all the flowers. A milestone-loving media hailed her as if she were a rare and valuable piece of folk art whose beauty lay in its age and usefulness. The Pen & Brush Club, which since 1913 had refused to elect anyone else its president, gave her a tea; Tarbell read paeans to herself on editorial pages and attended The New York Times Book Fair in the newly opened Rockefeller Center built by the fortune she had worked to discredit.

  In interviews she took the opportunity to speak out against Hitler and to caution that the New Deal was promising more than it would be able to deliver. An interviewer for radio’s Heinz Magazine of the Air asked her what it was like to be the dean of American letters. She replied that her claim to fame was working into her eightieth year. After a New York Times reporter asked if she would ever quit working, she quipped: “I can’t. I don’t come under Social Security.”

  Her birthday dinner reunited her with the John Finleys, the Ray Stannard Bakers, and Sam McClure who dominated the evening with tales of his marriage, courtship, and the creation of the magazine. “We all listened as if we’d never heard the stories before,”15 Tarbell wrote Roseboro gaily. Now when her old friends met they scrutinized each other’s health and appearances closely, partly out of concern and partly from a competitive spirit.

  Titusville also honored her in these last years of her life. In January 1939, when she was eighty-one, the tall, frail woman wrapped in a black lamb-trimmed coat, slowed by age and Parkinson’s disease, revisited the old Tarbell house on Main Street, where a photographer asked her to pose for The Associated Press. She did, with her glasses slightly askew on her nose. Her car drove down the snow-covered hill where she and Will used to slide on his sled “The Red Devil,” to the place where Monsieur Claude tried to help her speak French, and the Benson Library, which she had encouraged local women’s groups to build, but which had not carried The American because of its anti-Standard leanings.

  Titusville gave her a Recognition Dinner in the high-school gymnasium catered by the cafeteria staff of the YMCA. After her old friend Annette Farwell Grumbine introduced her, Ida rose and three hundred people stood with her. During their long and enthusiastic ovation, she could not hide her tears. She tried to be humorous: “I have been writing for forty or more years,” she said, “but never before has anything like this occurred.” She recalled her friendships, not trusting herself to mention the name of Josephine Henderson who had died a decade before, and said: “It was lucky for me that my family came to Titusville. I received the best instruction in life in this city and the good things given to me in those early years have remained with me. I got a good start here and I shall always consider Titusville my home and later I shall rest in beautiful Woodlawn [Cemetery], no more beautiful spot in the world.”16

  The blessing of long life is debatable. In her last years, Ida Tarbell shouldered more responsibilities even as her shoulders hunched with age. She seemed to soften; her capacity for kindness seemed only to grow. Once when she required hospitalization in New York for heart trouble, she insisted that the doctor not admit her to St. Luke’s because her secretary’s husband had died there and she didn’t want Mrs. Wolfe to have to return to the place that had brought her pain.

  As Viola Roseboro wrote McCormick: “She seems to me to … get warmer as she grows older. There is a marvelous warm good will that emanates from her; that is the word; it is not announced, it radiates. All sorts of people I find feeling it, along with her intrinsic importance.”17

  Her own fatigue increased her empathy for others. Increasingly, Tarbell found herself thinking of a puppy that she had found in 1906 after she left McClure. She had rented a house in Nantucket and the collie that was there gave birth. The weakest of the litter kept crawling away to die, but Tarbell would bring it back to the sun. Over and over the puppy kept struggling away, trying to find a place to die in peace. She thought she understood that puppy now.18

  She started work on a new book—Life After Eighty—so that she could use her old age for material, if nothing else. She asked Dr. John H. Kellogg for literature on his Human Bettermen
t Institute at Battle Creek, Michigan. He responded by sending her samples of his many products. Apparently in the interests of science, the once-decorous Tarbell made a full report on her bodily functions: “That LD-Lax of yours has been especially effective. I followed directions in taking it and think it has been particularly welcome to my colin [sic].” After thanking him for helping her “digestive apparatus,” she admitted: “I would like to join your Autocracy of Health, but I am afraid I am not militant enough in that regard to tea, coffee, alcohol and tobacco and all that clan for your ranks. I like a glass of sherry now and then and when I have a cold a bit of whisky. And I do drink a cup of coffee, though I like Postum. I hope this confession will not cast me into the outer darkness of your opinion.”19

  Her charm was deceptive. She wrote Viola Roseboro that she was suspicious of health products, having tried Kellogg’s without enthusiasm. Often the two old ladies exchanged letters consisting of nothing but wild and wavy lines. No one will ever know if the correspondents could comprehend each other.

  Death notices intrigued her. Scanning the headlines, she saw that heart attacks claimed many. “If I didn’t do as [the doctors] told me I saw I was headed for the obituary column,” she gamely wrote in her manuscript. “Mr. P.,” as she called her disease, had rendered her hand useless, so at eighty she taught herself to type. Her heart allowed her to sit up only an hour a day, and she was firmly limited to this by nurses and a vigilant Sarah. Often she used the time to write to Phillips. Margins and shift keys defied her, as did the spacing bar; and for some time she made exclamation points by combining a period with a capital I. In a letter that displayed these technical difficulties, she told Phillips: “What disturbs me is that I am so slow. If I could write quickly I believe I could have a lot of fun, for to my surprise I can compose on the machine quite as well as with my pen.”20