She was diligent in her research and never more so than in her early days in Washington. Her hopes of being sent to Paris faded when she saw that the capital possessed a great deal of material on Bonaparte. Hubbard’s personal library contained the latest books and key memoirs in English. The State Department provided Napoleonic letters, and libraries throughout the city offered contemporary French newspapers and pamphlets in German, French, and English detailing Europe’s response to the Corsican upstart.
Ida finished the first installment in six weeks and Hubbard approved it. His trip to California in October complicated but did not curtail his participation. Hubbard had the proofs sent to him, observing, “The second [installment] is better than the first, but there was still room for improvement.” Now that she had more time, he said (but not much more, she may have thought), she would be able to do still better. He said he felt so much interest in her that he must make her a success: “You are a born lady and always will be one whom I will be glad to call a friend.” He promised he would be home in time to make her future articles “right.”2
In successive letters, he made further corrections. When the first installment was published, he wrote her that he had compared her work to The Century article and that if she had had the same opportunity to procure material, hers would have been the better one. But Hubbard should have rated Tarbell higher. Her series was distinguished by its clarity. The Century writer set forth the historic movements that made possible Napoleon’s rise, but Tarbell did not allow her hero to be swamped in background. Her narrative was driven forward by the energy of her subject and her talent for discarding what was not crucial to an understanding of the man himself. For example, the Battle of Trafalgar, which ended Napoleon’s hopes of invading England, got short shrift because Napoleon himself did not personally take part in it.
It is still a joy to read her series. One understands the French hero from the inside, identifies with the boy and triumphs with the man. Tarbell skillfully captures the young Bonaparte growing up on tales of the Corsican rebellion and criticizing his father for being conquered by the French. The boy was so impassioned that he volunteered in the British navy. Only when Napoleon was sent to a French military school does one see him begin his assault on power.
Tarbell explained that besides being a military genius who made Europe the empire of France, Napoleon was a rare executive who codified and clarified French laws and improved French educational and banking systems. Because he began life in barely civilized Corsica, some thought his achievement divine or diabolic. Tarbell took pains to demythologize him and claimed that along with his formidable gifts, such as insight into complex situations and the ability to see what needed to be done, Napoleon succeeded because of his appetite for hard work and his willingness to handle details himself.
The biographer ultimately judged that Napoleon had two cardinal faults—he abused the rights of others and he overreached himself. She moralized: “He was the greatest genius of his time, perhaps of all time, yet he lacked the crown of greatness—that high wisdom born of reflection and introspection which knows its own powers and limitations, and never abuses them; that fine sense of proportion which holds the rights of others in the same solemn reverence which it demands for its own.”3
Napoleon did not seize her imagination as other biographical subjects later would, but he was an early prototype of the Tarbell hero—entirely self-made, born in squalor and risen to power on the world stage. But she did not have time to let her fancy play over Napoleon, nor to do original research. She called her life of Napoleon “biography on the gallop” and she was amazed by the thunderclap of response. Her series debuted in November 1894, and circulation jumped from 24,500 to 65,000. Even The Century’s author, William H. Sloan, wrote her. He said: “I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time … no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.”4
Critical acclaim was immediately forthcoming. The New York Press called the work “the best short life of Napoleon we have ever seen, and its illustrations are admirable.” The Boston Globe noted: “It is familiar with the latest as well as with older data, and is so painstaking in research that it brings out much that is new to most readers. It recognized the scientific spirit of modern historical criticism, and is firsthand and attractive in style.” McClure’s itself came in for a share of the glory in the Topeka Democrat review: “McClure’s Magazine for November [1894] challenges public admiration, both in its illustrations and in its literary contents. No magazine within the past year has come to the front more rapidly in popular favor.”
Tarbell would have been the first to say that the illustrations were essential to the series’ success. To McClure’s contemporary readers, they were like first sight to a blind man. Everyone had heard of Napoleon, but few knew what he looked like. Even today those familiar only with stereotypes are struck by pictures of the slim young Bonaparte with lank and flowing hair.
An upstart magazine like McClure’s could compete with a quality publication like The Century only because of technological innovation. The new process of photoengraving and the development of cheap glazed paper allowed McClure to have his pictures reproduced from photographs rather than from costly engravings—with notable exceptions such as the Napoleon collection. The Century clung to the engraving process longer than any other magazine, but its aesthetic advantage was lost on the general audience.
If Tarbell and her rival Sloan spoke well of each other, McClure and his counterpart at The Century knew they were joined in battle. When The Century stressed the care that had gone into its Napoleon, McClure sent out promotional material announcing that Ida Tarbell had spent three years of preliminary study in France before beginning her work.
McClure, who had peddled pans in the Midwest and operated a newspaper syndicate, knew what his public liked. It wanted articles about other people, especially those with romantic careers. Shrewdly, he did not assume that his readers knew about opera or the great battles of history; rather, he told them who and what were shaping their world. He gave them a popular magazine of quality, introduced them to important people like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, and to such immediate topics as the “national disease of nervousness” (the climate was responsible, he claimed). As British writers were then the rage, he published Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a writer-physician named Arthur Conan Doyle.
Tarbell’s Napoleon boosted circulation and other writers kept it going in a whirligig of popularity in which they all shared. The magazine’s readership had swelled to 100,000 by the time the series ended. Only once in that time had they been able to print enough copies to meet demand. McClure was emboldened to be the first to set firm advertising rates and it took time for advertisers to realize they could not bargain them down. Even when the magazine had a particularly acute cash flow problem, the business staff refused to discount a $750-dollar contract down to $600; they wanted to convince advertisers they meant what they said. That firmness did not weaken their revenue. From 1895 to 1897, McClure’s carried the largest amount of advertising of any magazine in the world. Although others like Munsey’s exceeded them in circulation, McClure’s received more advertising patronage because of its quality and because of the type of people who subscribed—what is today called demographics. Business manager Albert Brady announced monthly circulation figures whether they increased or decreased. By the late 1890s, the publisher guaranteed a circulation of at least a quarter million and comfortably exceeded that.
Their printing facilities were so modern that McClure’s could turn out the magazine in an astonishingly short period of ten days, which enabled it to publish books as well as print the magazine.5
Ida’s involvement with the life of Napoleon did not end with the appearance of the last installment of her series. McClure’s produced a book edition of The Short Life of Napoleon that was the first of i
ts many diversifications. McClure printed a second edition in May 1895, which brought total copies printed to thirty-seven thousand. Tarbell profited from it all her life. In 1901, she added A Sketch of the Life of Josephine, the first full account to appear in English. Basing her work on the research of Frédéric Masson and others, Tarbell depicted Josephine as profligate but good-hearted and concluded that had Josephine been faithful, Napoleon probably would not have divorced her. Interestingly, Tarbell ignored the primary question of Napoleon’s need for an heir.
The Life of Napoleon remained one of Ida’s enduring successes. In 1911, after schoolboys who had founded a Napoleon club peppered her with questions, she reread her book and wrote to George Brett of Macmillan, who was then her publisher, that it was a better popular biography than she had realized. She was even more pleased when she was seventy and King Features paid Macmillan $750 to synopsize her work.
But in 1894, Ida Tarbell had expected nothing from her effort but $40 a week in salary and a better understanding of France’s revolutionary period. She was pleasantly amazed, just as she had been in school when by merely doing her work she was found to be the smartest person in class, that Bonaparte scholars and even her subject’s grandnephew desired to meet with her and that readers wrote in requesting to know more about her. Charles Scribner had been debating whether or not to publish her Mme Roland as the subject lacked popular appeal; but when Ida Tarbell became known, he decided to go ahead. She so heavily corrected the proof and sent out so many free copies that her first royalty check amounted to only forty-eight cents. Tarbell did not care about the size of her profits. What concerned her was the book’s quality and the critics’ approval of her efforts.
Fame beguiled her and she knew it. It upended her former expectations and presented her with a whole new life. She had accepted the job solely as a means of getting home, but now employment no longer seemed like such a bad thing; being footloose no longer seemed so appealing. Return to France could be postponed. She now thought there could be nothing more invigorating than the energy, adventure, and ferment of being part of McClure’s Magazine: “What really startled me about that sketch [of Napoleon] was the way it settled things for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence. Chiefly, it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship into the McClure crowd …”6
Now she made her home in Washington as a member of the Hubbard set. In the 1890s, the nouveaux riches hobnobbed with titled foreigners. The Hubbards, however, entertained the aristocracy of achievement—diplomats, scientists, and statesmen like Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man Without a Country, and Samuel P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Tarbell boarded at the establishment of a Mrs. Patterson on I Street. The fashionables had recently decamped toward Dupont Circle, yet among Tarbell’s fellow boarders was Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts. Now nearly seventy, he had been a leader in Reconstruction legislation and antitrust law. Hoar was a crusty classicist who declaimed Homer at the Sunday breakfast table as well as waxing eloquent on the perfection of his hostess’s codfish balls. The senator and his wife, Mrs. Patterson and her daughter, and Ida Tarbell made up a little family, a home Ida described as “one of the most comfortable and delightful living places into which I had ever dropped. Such food! And best of all the Senator!”7
To be in Hoar’s presence was to take a crash course in American ideals of public service, the rights of the individual, and freedom from foreign entanglements. But an internationalist point of view contrary to Hoar’s was gaining ground as Cuba agitated for independence from Spain. Many felt that Washington should intervene since the dispute was so close to American shores. American designs on foreign territory grew as the great foreign powers expanded. As the nineteenth century closed, almost as if trying to meet a deadline, Germany, France, Belgium, and Great Britain had agreed to separate “spheres of influence,” whereby they apportioned the seaboard of Africa and then proceeded to do the same in China. Ambitious public servants in America felt the Monroe Doctrine had delineated their own sphere of influence and began to look with some impatience at Spain’s continued dominance of an unwilling Cuba.
Just as Ida’s father had described for her the injustice of Rockefeller’s take-over of the oil business, so Hoar discoursed on the immorality of America’s designs on Spain’s empire, especially the Philippines. He had a noble concept of America’s role as an example to the world, and it was a useful antidote to Ida Tarbell’s loyalty to France.
Her work for McClure required Ida to steep herself in a subject in which she had no initial interest—American history. Whether or not great personalities shape history, they do sell magazines. After Napoleon doubled circulation, Sam McClure conjectured that Lincoln would do the same and he chose Tarbell to oversee the project. The Lincoln series was to encompass only two or three dramatic articles by those who had known him. Ida Tarbell was not enthusiastic about the project.
Her enthusiasm was for France and for its revolutionary period, not for American icons. She had made herself sit through congressional debates, thinking they were a mandatory sight for visitors, but she had much preferred absorbing the atmosphere of Mme Roland in the museums and libraries of France.
She accepted McClure’s assignment to gather and edit the Lincoln material, but to herself she fretted that she was never faithful to what she chose for herself. She had given up her microscope for journalism, then turned from the woman question to the French Revolution. Now she was turning from Napoleon and her success as a writer to edit the reminiscences of others in the uninspiring realm of American history.
She felt the harness of employment pulled firmly around her neck and knew McClure was tugging her away from the play of her own ideas and the freedom to cultivate her own tastes and friends. “More than once I told myself that the sacrifice of my ambitions, of my love for Paris, for my friends there, was too much to ask of myself … but I was replacing them and suffering as I realized what was happening … I was beginning to repeat dolefully as well as more and more cynically, ‘Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse’ (Everything passes, perishes, palls).”8
In giving up the life of an independent writer, she had met a crisis in life. She decided in favor of what was useful; and having once made that decision, she held nothing of herself in reserve. A McClure’s staffer recalled her obedience to the demands of McClure and her job: “One little thing that I marvelled at in those days was that she could mobilize just as swiftly as any lad in the place—could accept a decision at noon to start for Chicago that night without turning a hair. I suppose there have been other females like that—I glimpse them in books [on] great travellers but she is the only one I ever saw keep it up right along; thereby in her case wiping out one good ground for paying women less than men.”9
Tarbell would cover many miles in researching Lincoln, but she began her efforts close to home at the Washington Literary Society where John Nicolay was a member and she an honored guest. Nicolay was a former private secretary to Lincoln and coauthor with John Jay of a ten-volume study of the late president. Southern hospitality, Victorian formality, and some wit flourished at the meeting of the society, but Nicolay gave her a chilly reception when she asked him for any material he might not have included in his own work. He at first assured her there was nothing more to be published, then told her that the subject was his and that she should stay away.
She had hoped, with naïveté or calculation, that Nicolay would share his insights with her and possibly an unpublished letter; but his rebuff had the effect all r
ebuffs had on Ida Tarbell—it inspired her to the exceptional.
Previous biographers had focused on private papers to which they had access or on their own firsthand experiences with Lincoln. Tarbell decided to investigate court records, county histories, and newspapers for traces of Lincoln’s life and early cases, and for information about his years of obscurity which had become a field for sometimes unpleasant conjecture. She wanted to come up with something original, something others might have missed.
Finding fresh material about Lincoln thirty years after his death seemed as likely as uncovering a new Washington or an unknown Franklin. The slain president already had several biographers and was fixed in the public mind.
Undaunted, in February 1895 she boarded a train for Knob Creek, Kentucky, to begin her quest around Lincoln’s birthplace. She was to be gone a month, journeying through the scrubby fields of Indiana and on to Springfield, Illinois. Seeing her off, McClure showed a sudden pang of concern for the woman he was sending to the boondocks of the South. “Have you warm bed socks?” he asked. “We’ll send you some if not. It will be awful in those Kentucky hotels.”
That prediction proved entirely correct during her first month of what she called “Lincoln hunting.” Small town hostelries varied in their cleanliness and respectability; she was an object of lively curiosity as she traveled alone, asking questions about local inhabitants and taking photographs. Certainly she herself was uncomfortable. Strange hotels so dismayed her that her hand shook every time she signed a register.
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