IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Unlike botany, journalism was a field where women had made a place for themselves and Ida Tarbell could try to do the same. She could become the best on Dr. Flood’s publication, but what if she tried herself outside the Allegheny foothills? In the fortnightly Revue des Deux Mondes she read the work of Ferdinand Brunetière, who wrote of French writers in terms of their evolution from predecessors and their contributions to the literary generations that followed. Above all, Brunetière insisted art should serve a moral purpose. With great constancy, she set about to follow his example. Her first major attempt, thorough but dauntingly ponderous, was “The Arts and Industries of Cincinnati,” published in The Chautauquan of December 1886. She then took up a topic that concerned her more personally.

  She purported to be interested in woman suffrage as a social issue rather than as a question of her own rights as a citizen. Jo Henderson and Harriet Carter were firmly against woman’s franchisement; but before deciding, Ida wanted to know if women would accomplish more with the vote than men had, if woman’s nature fit her for a public role, and how she could make a fruitful life for herself.

  She was like a scientist considering what this gender, this subspecies of which she was a member, could accomplish. Could it invent? Could it contribute? She doubted woman would reform the world with the vote, but she was insulted by suffragists who said that women had secondary status and inferior minds.

  When The Chautauquan ran an article by Mary Lowe Dickenson saying that only ninety of twenty-two thousand patents issued one year went to women and that these were “merely” for household inventions, Ida was provoked. She traveled to the United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and did her first investigative reporting. “I had been disturbed for some time by what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of women by many active in the campaign for suffrage,” she wrote fifty years later. “They agreed with their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That, they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather to throw doubt on [their] creative capacity … I had seen so much of women’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she had the same chance as a man to get one.”15

  She discovered that, although the article had said that women had won 334 patents in the history of the United States, the number was actually 935. In a four-thousand-word article, Tarbell claimed that it was no disparagement if women patented household devices—invention was invention: “Many of the patents suggest pictures at once pathetic and comical. Who cannot fancy the desperation into which the woman was driven who patented a preparation for kindling fires?” She cited contrivances for driving barrel hoops and improving train wheels and predicted that women would innovate still more as industrial education increased.

  Although she tried to vindicate her American sisters, Ida aspired to the achievements attributed to France and Frenchwomen. She was transported by the notion of a Parisian salon where worthy people gathered and matched wits, but writing for The Chautauquan did not allow her to give an unqualified endorsement to anything but Scripture.

  Tarbell concluded that although Mme de Staël wrote novels and political observations, her life was unsatisfactory because she neither savored solitude nor learned contemplation of higher things. In Mme Manon Phlipon de Roland, however, she found her ideal. It appeared that this woman had influenced leading Republican and Girondist men to throw off the yoke of the king. An intellectual architect of the revolution, when she herself went to the guillotine her last words were “O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!” Wife, mother, foe of the status quo and prominent personage, Mme Roland was the most powerful woman Ida had encountered and embodied all the traits Tarbell thought most admirable but would never admit she aspired to.

  Had this legendary figure been alive—a lecturer at Chautauqua or a visitor to Meadville—Ida would have found her as vulnerable to scrutiny as leading feminists. As ever, idealizations appealed to her more directly than actual people.

  In an article titled “The Queen of the Gironde,”16 Tarbell portrayed Mme Roland as a studious girl, intellectually without sham. Manon Phlipon de Roland was, like Tarbell herself, a dutiful and studious woman of keen intellect. When finally obliged to marry, Manon Phlipon chose a man who gave her access to national power, but Tarbell described this as a fortuitous accident, not an inspired choice. Ida seemed unable to deal with the topic of ambition—Mme Roland emerged as a force without personal assertiveness whose merit alone won her a role in events. Just as Ida lacked insight into how women traditionally got on in the world, she also lacked research material and was rankled by it. “Soon I became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were from so meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame Roland.”17 Indeed, the vision of Mme Roland was the spark that exploded the frustration within her.

  Writing had become too important to be fitted in at the end of the day or early mornings. It required a concentration that could only be given in the best working hours. Her time and energy were owned by The Chautauquan, so she wrote what would be of use to it. T. L. Flood insisted that her job was to edit. He told her she was no writer. Still, she kept on writing.

  She was increasingly offended by the pseudoacademia of Chautauquan education, with its mock graduations complete with girls strewing flowers. Those around her were intellectually half asleep but seemed wholly satisfied with their limited forays into the world of ideas. Now an old maid of thirty-three, rooted in a secure world where she held a respected place, Ida felt established to the point of being trapped. She once wrote: “I had always a vision of myself settled somewhere in a secure corner, simple, not too large. I never had wanted things; I always had a dislike of impedimenta, but I wanted something cheerful and warm and enduring.” Now that she had it, she knew it wasn’t enough. She desired to do one thing well. Her job required that she do many things adequately. “The work I was doing demanded a scattering of mind which I began to fear would unfit me for ever thinking anything through.”18

  Visits home only aggravated her claustrophobia. Aside from Will’s three young children, her family had remained exactly as they had been for decades. Her father’s interests were still his Sunday school class and the oil wells that remained to him. Her mother was concerned with escapes to the parental farm she had inherited and with unwelcome baby-sitting. Sarah alternated neurasthenia with a spinster’s social life, and Will was consumed by the Elks Club and the independents’ futile attempts to unite against the Standard.

  Beckoned by the work of Brunetière and the shade of Mme Roland, Ida Tarbell began to think of revolt, of escape, of studying in Paris and writing Roland’s biography. Visions of Paris, its medieval stones and the succulent sounds of French, which she had taught herself to read fluently, made her believe something better was waiting for her and that she could seize it.

  Now that she was on the brink of giving up security, she saw corroboration for the idea everywhere. She sensed a message the day an elderly visiting minister leaned over his lectern to shout to the congregation, “You’re dying of respectability!” She saw an omen in the defeat of a gubernatorial candidate who had seemed a shoo-in. She grew increasingly confident of her decision to leave Meadville and all it had come to represent.

  In her mind her plans worked beautifully and carried her forward to a new and happier, more profitable world; but when she broached the idea at “The Co-ops,” she was assaulted by “good sense.” “There were friends who said none too politely: ‘Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places fo
r themselves after thirty.’ There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: ‘You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?’”19

  Ida deliberated and wavered, but at last the decision was made. She left her job precipitously, taking with her Josephine Henderson and Mary Henry. In effect, it was a walkout.

  Flood’s parting letter commended her as a “high-minded Christian woman whose strength and force of character he had learned to admire” and said he hoped her health would soon improve. However, it is too much to believe that three vigorous young women had been forced to resign simultaneously.

  The Methodist community of western Pennsylvania and New York shared scanty bits of information about it for months. Half a year after her departure, Tarbell reported to her family: “Mr. Nichols put a note into his wife’s letter in which he said he met Mr. Duncan of Chautauqua fame at Duluth in the summer, that they talked about me and that Mr. Duncan told him that Prof. Cumnock told him (Mr. D) ‘how brutally’ Flood acted about me.” Ida also heard that Frances Willard told Flood: “I think that Miss Henry and Miss Tarbell probably had sufficient reasons for leaving as they did,”20 but apparently, no one was so indecorous as to put the whole story in print and gladden the heart of a future biographer.

  What could have caused them to leave? It is possible there was some impropriety, but more likely, Ida made some request, was denied it, and left. Flood never allowed any name but his on the masthead of The Chautauquan. Ida’s title, one shared by others on the staff, was assistant editor. In 1889, Flood named his scrapegrace nineteen-year-old son Ned editor of the Daily Assembly summer paper. The following year Ned became associate editor of The Chautauquan. It is likely that Ida threatened to resign unless she received a promotion and in response Flood either fired her directly or forced her to resign.

  Whatever happened, Ida was so uncomfortable about it that she mentioned it only in family letters. She loved a good joke even at her own expense and often mocked herself, but she was never casual about the Reverend T. L. Flood. In family letters she referred to having left The Chautauquan beaten. She felt she was a failure and a disgrace, rejected by the Lord, and was haunted by Flood’s prediction that she would starve. The closest she ever came to saying she was fired was demurring that someone who had complimented her “must have been trying to comfort Mother for my beheading at Meadville when he made that pretty speech.”21

  Ida Tarbell had always derived a certain strength from being forced into a corner. Unceremoniously returned to Titusville, she was pressured into doing the bold and unexpected. She saw nowhere to go but Paris where she could study at the Sorbonne and write the story of Mme Roland. Since she had not been able to save much money, she would somehow have to earn some in France. What better way than by writing?

  “I had heard of newspaper syndicates, and it occurred to me that I might write articles in Paris and syndicate them. I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about it, and I took the hardest possible way. I went to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and several other cities, saw the editors of the leading newspaper in each town, and explained my scheme. How I ever managed to sell them the idea I can’t understand! But in some way I did persuade half a dozen editors to take articles from me, at six dollars an article.”22

  She now read French so well that she could translate articles for The Chautauquan, but doubted that she spoke fluently enough to get herself a room. She asked Titusville’s Frenchman, a dyer named Séraphin Claude, to tutor her. Three times a week she went to his shop for conversation and lessons until he pronounced her sufficiently facile in common phrases.

  She was an inspiration to Jo Henderson and Mary Henry who decided they too would come along to Paris, study French, and write syndicate letters of their own. She rejoiced at the news, partly because she wanted their company and partly because she wanted to share expenses.

  She had broken free and was moving to a larger sphere. “It was not to be ‘See Paris and die,’ as more than one friend had jeered. I knew with certainty it was to be ‘See Paris and live.’”23

  PART II

  EXALTATION

  Four

  Une Femme Travailleuse

  “There is nothing more curious than the state of dilation of the American when he first sets foot in Europe. Reserve is broken, discretion is forgotten, sentiment glows. He returns for a period to the naive expansiveness of his childhood. Sometimes weeks pass before he recovers his normal attitude of mind, or he is shocked into a realization of his condition.”1

  Thus Ida Tarbell described her situation in August 1891. She had never known that a place could enfold her and captivate so completely. Strangers were responsive. Boys on the stairs tipped their hats, patrons greeted her in restaurants, and people on the street cared if she found her way. Everything seemed in harmony from the scale of the buildings to the gray facades coloring like a Monet painting in the play of sunlight.

  Paris in the 1890s was a city renewed. Sacré Coeur was under construction, the Eiffel Tower and Gare Saint Lazare were spanking new, and electric lights had just begun to twinkle on the boulevards. The Paris of modern imagination had debuted, bringing with it the Impressionists, Marcel Proust, and anarchism. Above all, to Ida Tarbell, the city offered beauty and infinite possibility.

  The cost of spiritual fulfillment was poverty, a bohemian poverty of twenty-cent bouillon dinners and penny tours of Paris atop a horse-drawn omnibus. If the diet was unvaried, the open-air rides seemed ever new—traveling inside would have been twice as expensive and she would have seen only half as much.

  With her were Jo Henderson, Mary Henry, and Annie Towle, a friend of Mary’s from Evanston, Illinois, who was welcomed in part because she would pay a share of the rent.

  Ida, a scant year older than Jo, announced that since she was the eldest, she was the chaperone and would look after all of them. She was so serious about her responsibility—despite the fact that she led them to the wrong pier before they boarded their steamer—that men they met on the boat nicknamed Ida “Mammy.”

  As leader, she focused their quest for rooms in the area of the Musée de Cluny because she liked its particularly French sound. After three days of inspecting bug- and odor-infested lodgings while trying to make themselves understood in French, Ida toted up the cost of their Right Bank hotel, plus fees for candles, soap, and fire, and convinced her companions of the merits of boarding in the house of a Mme Bonnet, which offered two tiny bedrooms, a salon, and a kitchenette commodious enough to hold a sink. They had dreamed of a French balcony, but settled for a window seat and learned to crane their necks to see the sky. By August 21, 1891, seventeen days after leaving Titusville, Ida was at work writing descriptions of Paris in her bedroom at 5 Rue du Sommerard.

  Only on Sundays did she relax. Men they had met crossing the Atlantic drove Ida and her companions through the Bois de Boulogne in elegant barouches and took them to dinner at the Hippodrome. Ida sipped wine and quaffed beer with her gentlemen friends and dutifully wrote home about it: “You mustn’t think I am getting Frenchy in my morals because I do things here on Sunday which I don’t do at home. I only do these things to see what the French life really is.”2

  When the gentlemen expressed concern over whether they would be safe living in the Latin Quarter, Ida airily assured them that their nearest neighbor was a prince. Indeed, the Bonnet establishment was an improbable household of the kind possible only in student districts. Besides the quartet of Methodist maidens, it included members of the royal Tewfik family of Egypt. Mme Bonnet had told them that her only other boarder was a prince studying at Saint-Cyr Military Academy who only used his lodgings on weekends, but the Americans came home one night to discover they were living with eleven Mohammedans. They reacted as if they were confronting Ali Baba’s band: “They wanted us to dance. Think of it! On Sunday night! We thanked them and explained in broken French that we did not do that in America on Sunday,” Ida told her family. “They
took it politely and whispered among themselves that we were très religieuse.“3

  The Egyptians wished to know about life in America, particularly marital customs, as they were interested in reforming the Muslim practice of not looking on their brides until after their weddings. One of the Tewfiks was quite taken with Annie and she responded by going alone with him to the zoo. Ida was aghast and took great care to convince Annie not to do such a thing again, but the Egyptians’ good-heartedness soon won Ida over.

  Prince Said Toussoum was exceedingly handsome at age twenty, but Ida was taken by his boyishness. “I am growing very fond of the Prince,” she wrote home. “He is such a simple-hearted fellow and it is a splendid lesson in politeness to see the way in which he makes everybody love him. I didn’t suppose I would ever be willing to call anybody ‘My Lord’ but I do it with the greatest ease.” She added that she had invited him to visit Titusville.4

  One Sunday, Prince Said served Egyptian gumbo and personally prepared for them powdered coffee—a substance quite finer than the ground variety of Titusville. That night Ida joined in the dancing and when she left she took with her Prince Said’s gift of a fez.

  So close did they all become that the death of the khedive hit her as if it had been President Benjamin Harrison. The Egyptians mournfully passed around his picture, dwelt at length on the beauty of his wife, and speculated that one of their uncles would be elected president of the council. In their lamentations, they began to fear for their own health and talked of their hatred of English occupation. In sympathy, Ida herself grew irate. She raised her glass of l’eau sucrée [sugar and water] and drank repeatedly to roars of “À bas l’Angleterre!”