IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She was not a girl one noticed for her looks. Her college photographs show a prominent nose and frizzy hair pulled back behind large ears, yet the luminous eyes balanced other features that were frozen by the shutter.

  She could alter herself little physically, but she did what she could with her clothing. Her classroom gown was a tightly fitted black redingote with a tiny train trimmed with forty-eight white quarter-sized buttons. She laid aside hoop skirts and corsets in the interests of female dress reform, and shocked her classmates by wearing a skirt above her ankles. The poor condition of the sidewalks sometimes forced her to lift her hem and thus daintily reveal a scarlet petticoat that her mother had assumed no one else would ever see.

  Outside class, Ida was an editor of the college publication, secretary of the junior class, and an active member of Ossoli, the lady’s literary society, which doubtlessly was named after Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the nineteenth century’s outstanding American woman of letters. Ossoli girls addressed the day’s topics and added philosophy and history to their poetry and literature shelves. The Philo-Franklin and The Allegheny societies for men enjoyed far more elegant quarters, as if to punish female sensibility for having the temerity to step from pedestal and onto podium. While men’s clubs “debated,” Ossoli “discussed,” but it also sponsored five of eight public lectures given in one year.

  The Campus of July 1878 commended one of Ida’s speeches: “She showed that our present results had been brought about by toil and perseverance. That to every age had been entrusted something to develop whose light has been the peculiar work of that period. She spoke of the great interest manifested in women’s education and how variously this subject has been viewed in the ages. She touched a chord in every true man or woman’s heart when she said: ‘Teach woman that she must be educated, not for man, but for her Creator.’”

  She did not say that woman had as much need or right to education as a man, nor could she bring herself to state that ambition and glory were worthy of a woman. In a talk on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ida balanced the achievement of womankind’s outstanding poet by stating that Browning never sought the fame that came to her.

  Something extraordinary happened in the class of 1880—half its officers were female and it elected a woman president. Along the way, men and women developed a companionship that lasted through the years and made it one of the most cohesive alumni groups at Allegheny.

  When a cornerstone for a permanent women’s dormitory was laid in June 1879, Ida Tarbell was selected to speak for the student body: “The movement for the Ladies’ Hall shows much of pure pluck. The girls have appreciated its necessity and made the best of their surroundings in the past. They said, ‘We were allowed to come to Allegheny College and shall remain, then by and by they will have to prepare a place for us.’ As to our classmates, never were women in college halls treated more royally than we are, never was truer chivalry manifested than in the respect and kindness with which Allegheny women are received by Allegheny men. We are deeply debtors to very many for the new surroundings to come in our college life and we purpose by improving these means for better culture, to show you the gratitude of true women.”

  In her studies and her social life, she involved herself not only with public speaking and the mud puppy, but with “the boy.” “I was not long in discovering him when I reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start soon yielded under the increased number of women, women in college, in special courses, in the Preparatory Department.… I was learning, learning fast, but the learning carried with it pains. I still had a stiff-necked determination to be free. To avoid entangling alliances of all kinds had become an obsession with me.”

  She did not wish to be labeled a Delta girl or a Phi Psi girl, feeling that she could have friends in all fraternities. Thus, in what she described as “a disastrous morning,” she wore four pins to chapel. Each boy had presented his as a token that Ida was his girl. No one expected her to amass a collection. Having “non-Frat” friends saved her from being a social outcast during the several months it took bruised feelings to mend.

  Some one boy did get closer than the others. In the Allegheny College collection of class pictures there is a photo of a Warren Shilling of Sharon, Pennsylvania. Its identification, accurate or not, reads: “Was engaged to Ida M. Tarbell—neither married.” Another clue to a strong attachment is in a poem she wrote a decade after graduation. In fifty lines more wistful than lyrical she writes in the person of a “literary woman” with “views on woman’s duty and what by laws her due.” The object of the poem is a lawyer named Jack and she would “… give my positions/To know, Jack, you have a weak spot/And that the moonlight on the campus/Makes you remember you have not forgot.” Jack may not have been her beau’s name, but there was a John D. Martin in her class, whose graduation picture shows him to have been a handsome mustachioed man. He became a Methodist minister.

  By the time she had her diploma, marriage no longer seemed so odious nor spinsterhood so necessary, according to her memoirs; but since she had no particular husband in mind, she felt free to spend her leisure time with her microscope, save money toward further study abroad, and earn her own way, somewhat over her father’s objections.

  College women in the nineteenth century could not readily fit prowess in dissection, a working knowledge of French, and oratorical skill into the working world. Two possibilities were open to the female graduating without prospect of marriage—teaching and missionary work. “At home we were entertaining preachers and elders and bishops. They were very much in evidence at Allegheny too. And they were constantly urging me to follow a ‘call’ which somehow I myself couldn’t hear.” When two clergymen were particularly insistent, she panicked. Weeping, Ida begged off, protesting she would have known if there had been a call, though they insisted it was sounding through them. What she did not add, lest she incur greater trouble, was that her study of comparative religions made her think that heathens were as righteous as her Sunday school. Instead of Africa or the Orient, she traveled to Poland, Ohio.

  The existence of the Poland Union Seminary was the community’s proudest accomplishment, but every church in town had taken a turn as its sponsor, with scant financial success. Now the Presbyterians inherited the task and had inadvertently forced the departure of a much-beloved teacher by cutting her annual salary from seven hundred dollars to six hundred.

  After many letters and a personal interview, the board of trustees decided Miss Tarbell’s enthusiasm, eagerness, and youth outweighed the other candidate’s twenty years of experience.5 Ida was appointed preceptress of the school for the year beginning August 23, 1880, at a salary of five hundred dollars per year. “If I had been going on my honeymoon, I should scarcely have been more expectant or more curious,” she said of her first job.

  She admired Poland’s air of stability, its almost New England atmosphere, its roomy houses with pleasant yards, and its farmland with its timeless cycle of sowing and harvesting. Yet she never felt welcome there. “People used to stop me on the street, tell me that they, and their parents before them, had gone to school to Miss Blakesley’s and lament that their children were now denied that privilege. I felt as guilty as if I were personally responsible.” Trying to be both high school and college, the seminary required Tarbell to teach two classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German—plus geology, botany, geometry, and trigonometry. She managed to stay one chapter ahead of her language classes, but she was confounded by the necessity of teaching grammar and math refresher courses to district schoolteachers whose tuition kept the school afloat. Some of the problems were ridiculously arcane and tripped her up. She could not match her students’ grasp of the tricky material and they smirked when she faltered in her explanations.

  Her discomfort continued for two months until she realized that while she labored to uncover and explain the general principles, her students simply memorized, in yearly ritual, the same solutions to the same puz
zles. With a sweet sense of revenge, she procured outside texts. Nonchalantly, she wrote on the blackboard new equations and unfamiliar sentences with multiple clauses. Happy to trick them, she ignored their protests that her examples were not in the books. In this lay the most pleasant recollection of her teaching years.

  Ida’s friendship with one of the town’s most unconventional girls was the antidote to thankless weary days. The first week of school, Clara Walker, whose father was on the school board, presented herself at the seminary and insisted that Ida go for a ride in her buggy. Fifty years later Tarbell would write, “Indeed, it was due to her understanding and affection that my two years in Poland, quite apart from the professional disappointment in them, were the gayest, most interesting, and in many ways the happiest of my life up to that time.”

  Clara, or Dot as she was known, indicated in her dress and open manner the rebellion Ida expressed by calling herself a socialist. She eschewed corsets and high heels and wore the costume of the free-spirited girl of the 1880s—the high shirtwaist with four-in-hand tie, flat shoes, and a tailor-made coat and skirt.

  Their friendship was a revelation to Ida, opening her eyes to social injustice on a far greater scale than she had imagined possible in the opportunity-laden oil regions. With Clara she visited communities of Welsh miners who worked on farms where ore was but another crop. Ida found exploring a coal shaft horrifying, despite the clusters of cottages and cured meat provided for the workers.6 On drives to Youngstown, ten miles away, she saw the industrial world aborning. One night after the theater she and Dot were stopped by a cortege of carts laden with corpses—the remains of men killed by an exploding furnace. The lamplight showed that the bodies were as charred as those she had seen as a child in Rouseville.

  After another trip they were caught up in a crowd of strapping, frenzied women protesting their husbands’ layoffs. That night she saw another side of women’s dependence and the passions hungry children could inspire. Thus in Poland, as in Titusville all those years before, impersonal industry became highly personal in its effects.

  Dot revealed what polite society spurned. She told Ida scandalous tales of how certain fortunes had been made, shared strange tales of depravity that emerged from the less cultivated parts of town. Seldom having heard of incest and lust, Ida professed to think these people had a very jolly time.

  Ida was now of an age where interest in “the boy” led naturally to marriage and physical intimacy. She doubtlessly had the curiosity and apprehensions of any eligible girl, but she did not have a desire to wed. Ida righteously disagreed when anyone indicated sex was perverse. “I have never been able to see why nature’s method of continuing the race was not as clean as any other of her processes,” she wrote a male friend in later years, but on a typed copy for her files she scribbled a note to herself: “Though it does seem to me rather grotesque.”7

  As preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary she was too busy and too exalted to leave time for suitors, but the work was unrewarding. Begun with high hopes, teaching proved a disappointment. She not only failed to save money toward study in Europe, but she was forced to borrow from her father. Her microscope stood unused as she spent week nights parsing sentences and calculating square roots. When her contract ended in June 1882, she gave up teaching forever.

  Dot and she remained friends until death, but life was never as good to Dot Walker as it had been in the days of her rides with Tarbell. Her father was ruined and disgraced by association with his boyhood chum William McKinley. McKinley, who proposed a duty on tin plate during his first term in Congress, persuaded the prosperous Walker to establish a stamping plant with McKinley’s brother-in-law. When the business failed, Walker was portrayed as having deluded the innocent politician. After she became a journalist, Ida wanted to present his side, but Walker would not allow Tarbell to write of it during his lifetime. She published his story in her autobiography when she was past eighty.

  Ida returned home after her first attempt at a career, thinking herself a failure. Students who would not learn and subjects she could not teach had not been part of her plan—nor had insufficient payment. The cold water of the working world doused, temporarily, the flame of her determination. At twenty-four she pronounced her career over and the dream of botany beyond her reach. Disheartened, she returned home facing two possibilities—spinsterhood or marriage.

  Her mood of gloom matched her family’s—the Bradford oil fields in which Franklin had so heavily invested were producing so generously that supply undercut price. The Standard Oil Company, knowing the only hope of profit lay in storing and withholding production from the market, gained control of companies that transported oil to market in pipelines, and embarked on nonstop tank construction. As the only buyer for Franklin Tarbell’s oil, Standard Oil offered little return on his investment.

  Thwarted by other independents’ increasing capitulation to the “octopus,” as Standard Oil was nicknamed, Franklin Tarbell, now in his mid-fifties, again looked to the West for his fortune. In the early spring of 1882, as Ida was completing her term in Poland, he and Will went to Huron in the Dakota Territories.

  Instead of traveling by horse and wagon as earlier pioneers had done, they took the train. The railroads were in fact promoting the “Dakota boom” and the Northern Pacific put on a demonstration of how to make a hundred percent profit in wheat growing. Will interrupted his law studies to take advantage of the opportunity. In a letter to a friend in Titusville, Will wrote that nearly every seat on the train had been filled with people bound for Dakota. He marveled over the land: “It’s limitless, like looking over the ocean … and so much beautiful black soil.” Will encouraged his friend to come—“Faro, poker, etc. are in Huron, but if you want a maid [young lady] a carload would pay well,”8 he advised, but he soon found one of his own. A nice girl, Ella Scott, whose family had left Illinois in hopes of wealth, proved more interesting than bachelorhood and so he married her.

  The family legend is that Franklin Tarbell decided against life in the Dakotas when a breeze lifted the toupee from his head as he paced on a railroad platform. At fifty-five, he had had enough of new beginnings. He returned home while Will lingered out West.

  Ida, living the life of elder unmarried daughter, looked after her mother and maternal grandfather who lost his wife while Ida was in Poland. When Allegheny College offered her the post of French and German teacher she declined. Instead, she sat in the tower room with her microscope and tested for amnifera, amoebalike creatures whose presence was a geological test for oil.

  Three

  A Young Lady of Fine Literary Mind

  The Chautauqua Assembly Herald noted in the summer of 1883: “This unique little paper will be enriched by the pen of Miss Ida M. Tarbell, a young lady of fine literary mind, endowed with the peculiar gift of a clear and forcible expression … Her wide reading and versatile brain, together with her love for children and lively sympathies for Christianity, will make her services of rare value to young people as an editor of this paper.”1

  The camp on Lake Chautauqua where the Tarbells spent their summers had grown into a permanent village of white cottages with high pointed eaves and gingerbread trim. Founded to furnish Bible instruction, the Chautauqua Assembly expanded to include lectures on science, history, and literature for those hungry for knowledge and the status it imparted. So that education could continue throughout the year, the magnetic co-founder and director, Dr. John H. Vincent, developed a four-year course of home reading complete with certificates of achievement. He called it the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

  This inspired the Reverend T. L. Flood, a Methodist minister with a keen business sense, to persuade Vincent of the merits both educational and financial in the establishment of a magazine to accompany the lesson plans.

  Flood preached at Ida’s church during her first winter back in Titusville and offered her the job of annotating articles. Having little else to occupy her beyond her own studies, she agreed: �
�To me it was only a temporary thing. I had no inclination toward writing or toward editorial work. This was a stop-gap—nothing more,”2 she said.

  It meant she would stay in Meadville, the magazine’s headquarters, for two weeks a month, leaving the rest of the time free for her microscope. If the job had significance to her, it was that the salary meant she would not have to ask her father for an allowance. Gradually, the two weeks stretched out to three, then every few months she would make time to go home, and finally her life centered in Meadville, where she worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

  The possibility of putting the accent over the wrong syllable terrified her. When she did err, it was brought to her attention not by Flood but by readers so intent that they cross-checked her notations with their own reference works. She plowed through a history of Greece and “Early Lessons in Vegetable Biology,” forcing herself to stay alert and to pluck from interminable paragraphs the salient concepts. Annotation wearied her, but the sight of her work in type was like magic that dispelled forever dreams of botany. Plans and calculations, the orderly progress she expected for her life, yielded to a coup of fate.

  Flood ran his publication as a cottage industry, using his study and dining room as offices. While she waited for the printer to deliver her proofs, Tarbell began to help out wherever she saw a need, especially in the small and crucial details of putting a magazine together. The Campus had been her only experience with editorial work, but she could see that the college effort had been managed more professionally than Flood’s. She tried her hand at preparing copy by pasting together the “News From Local Circles” column and following deadline schedules.