Tarbell was apparently unaware of the effect she had on young writers who were dazzled at meeting her and who lapped up her courtesy with slavish gratitude. She was goddess of the Olympus that was McClure’s Magazine. She, McClure, John Phillips, and art director August Jaccaci (pronounced “Yakatchy”) worked together, lunched together, and dined together, and occasionally a lucky young writer might be allowed to accompany them.
William Allen White, a rotund, rambunctious, and startlingly bright young newspaper editor from Emporia, Kansas, had garnered a national reputation for his editorial, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” which attacked populism. McClure accepted his “Court of Boyville” short stories and invited him to visit New York. White would become the interpreter of Midwestern life, an able political commentator, and biographer of presidents. Ida would come to love him and his wife Sallie enough to profess that Emporia was one of her favorite places on earth, but that was much later. The first night White met her in 1897, he was simply agog: “John Phillips, Jaccaci and Ida Tarbell took me far uptown on a street car amid an unbelievable squirming army of bicycles to Grant’s Tomb, where we had a gorgeous dinner and much tall talk about the magazine business and current literature,” he wrote in his memoirs. White recalled his awe: “These people knew Rudyard Kipling. They knew Robert Louis Stevenson. They had dealt with Anthony Hope Hawkins, whose novels were quite the vogue. The new English poets [Yeats and Housman were published by McClure’s] were their friends.”
White was relieved to find that these people were like those he knew back home. “They were at heart Mid-Western. They talked Mississippi Valley vernacular … They were making a magazine for our kind—the literate middle class,”22 he said. Unlike editors of established quality publications, McClure and his cohorts had faith in the intelligence of the mass of Americans.
White was not the only new writer swept into the McClure circle in 1897. Ray Stannard Baker was a slim, dark-haired, twenty-seven-year-old newspaper reporter with a serious manner and a cleft chin. He had covered the Pullman Strike, marched with Coxey’s Army, and tagged after the British reformer William Stead when he researched If Christ Came to Chicago. After Baker read Tarbell’s Lincoln series with fascination, he took up his courage and asked if McClure’s would be interested in an article on his uncle who had helped to capture John Wilkes Booth. McClure’s happily printed the story, gladly pointing out that Baker’s account corrected false information previously provided by The Century, McClure’s competitor.
Like White, Baker recalled in his autobiography his first meal with Phillips, Jaccaci, and Ida Tarbell: “I went out with them to the jolly table at the old Ashland House where they lunched together, a spot that still glimmers bright in my memory … I suppose I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else!”23
Unlike White, Baker was willing to spend time in New York and he became a contributing editor. He took his career seriously, settled his patient wife and children in Wisconsin or Michigan for long stretches so he was free to go off on assignments at the drop of a hat. He was given to introspection and to pondering the importance of what he was doing. Should he write a novel? Would California be more conducive to good work than New York? Thus he bedeviled himself throughout a distinguished career that spanned investigative journalism, essay writing, and handling the American press at the Versailles Conference. What Tarbell called “the unconventional intimacies of the crowd”—the camaraderie of men and women, and their talk—were a joy to him. All the writers, including Tarbell, felt they had something vital to tell their colleagues and fairly burst with chatter; but Baker, Tarbell observed, was the least talkative and the best listener of them all.
McClure well knew the merits of his talented staff, but Tarbell held a special place. Whatever he assigned her she did well, as he was fond of telling Phillips, and he utilized her qualities by having her ghost or edit memoirs for which she took no public credit. As a result, she channeled her writing energies into work that required her to understand such varied topics as the sequence of the Vicksburg campaign and aerodynamic principles. Her fondness for one of her subjects, Carl Schurz, made her feel her efforts were especially worthwhile.
Schurz had a staggering record of accomplishment. Driven from his native Germany because of his libertarian agitations, he emigrated to the United States. There he became an active abolitionist, friend of Abraham Lincoln, general in the Union army, American minister to Spain, senator from Missouri, secretary of the interior under Rutherford B. Hayes, and editor of the New York Evening Post. His vast range of experience had given him the demeanor of a philosophical activist, plus eager common sense and a trove of newsworthy memories.
Tarbell stole from The Century the right to publish his memoirs by offering Schurz a large sum of McClure’s money and by promising to save Schurz embarrassment by breaking the news of Schurz’s defection to Century editor Richard Gilder. She may have taken delight in a bit of retribution. Gilder was reported to have scoffed at her by saying, “McClure’s got a girl trying to write a life of Lincoln.”24
Ida worked on Schurz’s memoirs from August 1898 until his death in 1906. She liked best to see him at his home on Lake George where he indulged his high spirits. While awaiting breakfast, he sang snatches of Wagnerian operas in a clear, strong voice. Sometimes, in the middle of their work, he sprang up to improvise some lively tune on the piano. He was then a longtime widower of seventy: she was in her early forties and possibly a little in love with him. As she wrote in her autobiography: “There never was a more lovable or youthful man of seventy than Carl Schurz … He had come to mean more to me as a human being than anybody I had studied. I never doubted his motives, and he never bored me. Still, whenever I have the opportunity I pick up [his books]. The greatest regret of my professional life is that I shall not live to write another life of him. There is so much of him I never touched.”25
His special status became explicit in a letter she wrote her brother at Christmas in 1908, about three years after Schurz’s death. She presented Will with Schurz’s memoirs and said they represented “the only piece of editorial negotiation of which I am in any way proud. It can be fairly said that I secured The Reminiscences for McClure’s. Mr. Schurz told me repeatedly that they would not have gone there if it had not been for me … I should like you to keep these volumes beside my own ‘Completed Works’ in your library.”26
She was not as susceptible to all her subjects. Her experience with Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun and a War Department insider during the Civil War, was of another sort entirely. She thought him a curmudgeon pure and simple, and when Phillips and McClure told her that she was to be his ghost, she uncharacteristically tried to beg off. Dana’s biases, writ in acid on his editorial page, were in favor of the protective tariff and the sanctity of business, and against the evils of strikes and Tammany Hall. Schurz once told Ida that Dana’s malice proved the existence of a personal devil.
Dana had told McClure that Tarbell’s Life of Lincoln was one of the ten foremost books for Americans to read because it presented a true picture of the late president, but in his dealings with Ida herself, he conveyed no morsel of respect or warmth. Dana at seventy-eight, with a generous white beard and pince-nez, possessed the vigor of a man of forty, but he was so impersonal he did not even politely inquire “How are you?” The episode would stand in her mind as the only one of her business relations that included nothing but the job at hand.
Reviewers praised the Dana work as a contribution to the history of the Civil War, despite the fact that its style was simply that of a chronological narrative. One critic praised Dana for referring to accounts he had written at the time, but that touch was entirely the work of Ida Tarbell.27
Samuel P. Langley, the third man she helped to “write” for McClure’s, was a scientist. Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a pioneer in the mechanics of flight, and the first to show how birds soar on wind flu
ctuations, he insisted that man too would someday be able to fly. Before the Wright brothers, Langley was the hero of American aviation. He caused a model plane weighing twenty-five pounds to fly for ninety seconds over the Potomac. Ida’s account of the flight, complete with explanations of Langley’s theories—all under his by-line—so pleased Langley that he arranged a special treat. He invited her to the National Zoological Park in Rock Creek Park one day after the crowds had gone and, with the help of the director, made the kangaroo hop and the hyena laugh in an exclusive performance for Ida Tarbell.28
As in Paris, when she wrote about Pasteur and his institute, her enjoyment of science and her ability to understand its fundamentals stood her in good stead. McClure wanted more such serious efforts to present popular science. In that day, the farthest reaches of technology—the electric light, the telephone, the squawking phonograph, cable cars and trolleys—could be grasped by the average human mind, and McClure intended Tarbell to help him in this effort.
Washington, D.C., was at that time a center of science and Ida was at its hub. Each Wednesday evening, Alexander Graham Bell hosted informal receptions for a score of scientists and a few women of the family. As a close friend of Bell’s wife and mother-in-law, Tarbell was invited to hear papers and lectures on subjects ranging from the races of man to the life cycles of eels. The group called itself The National Geographic Society and privately published its papers until Tarbell successfully negotiated arrangements whereby McClure, Phillips and Co. published The National Geographic Magazine.29
Her major disappointment was that Bell refused to allow her to write his biography, saying he wanted nothing published in his lifetime; as consolation, he asked her to undertake the private commission of classifying his materials for a future biography. She declined, but suggested that H. G. Wells, who was writing for the syndicate, might produce something called “Pages from a Scientist’s Notebooks” based on the inventor’s papers.
Washington was of course about the business of government, as well as being a scientific center. In forging an unusual and rewarding working relationship with General Nelson A. Miles, commander in chief of the U.S. Army, Tarbell developed an opportunity to see how that government functioned in wartime. She was at Miles’s elbow the day the U.S.S. Maine blew up in Havana Harbor. The coming of war had been in the air, and typically McClure was one of the first to sense it, but he had not known which war it would be. General Miles had been dispatched to observe the Greco-Turkish War and the standing armies of Russia, Germany, and France which threatened to become embroiled in it. McClure wanted Tarbell to write up Miles’s conclusions; Miles, however, wanted to present a travelogue and show off his cultural attainments by digressing on the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great. Tarbell at last convinced him that McClure’s was interested only in military matters; she accomplished this with so much tact that he still modeled for her the special epaulet he had designed.
On February 16, 1898, when word came that the American ship had been blown up, Washington was taut with quiet. Tarbell presented herself at Miles’s office expecting to find her appointment canceled, but work proceeded as usual. Headquarters was hushed, except for orderlies who conveyed bulletins to Miles: “Two hundred fifty-three unaccounted for, two officers missing, ship in six fathoms of water, only her mast visible, sir.” And later in the afternoon: “All but four officers gone, sir.” Miles’s only reply was to blow his nose while the chief of staff, a man with a bullet hole in his cheek, mourned: “Ain’t it a pity! By Jove, ain’t it a pity!”30
Over the next two months, the country hovered between peace and war. No one was ever sure how the Maine blew up (a short-circuit in the electrical wiring, or some remote-control triggering by Spaniards, or even the American press may have been responsible. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, was thought by many to have instigated the war to boost circulation). Tarbell was impressed by the restraint shown by everyone in the War and Navy building—with one notable exception: the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt. With coattails flying, he thumped up and down the marble halls, bursting in on her sessions with Miles to bark an excited question or give unsought advice. She had heard he was preparing a special unit of volunteers which Western newspapers were calling “Teddy’s Terrors,” “Teddy’s Gilded Gang,” and “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” This antagonized her. She wanted peace, and he seemed to her a warmonger or a shameless grandstander. Although Roosevelt technically belonged to the Navy, he was clearly envisioning himself as part of an invading army, and Tarbell felt that if he did not believe in fidelity to his proper job in wartime, good manners, if nothing else, required that he resign his post. Her opposition to Teddy Roosevelt was not new. She believed he had betrayed dissident Republicans in 1884 when he bolted the Mugwump faction to support the party’s nominee, the incumbent Blaine, and her distrust made her skeptical even when Teddy waged war on corruption as police commissioner in New York City in the early 1890s.
President William McKinley delayed declaring war against Spain until late April 1898. In the interim, Ida obtained the continuing story of the Senate debate from Senator Hoar’s secretary. Dewey won the battle of Manila a few weeks later on May 1. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders entered Santiago, Cuba, in July, and in August the war was over.
Other McClure’s editors were excited about the war and knew it made for good copy. In February 1899 they published Rudyard Kipling’s poem exhorting Anglo-Saxons to “take up the White man’s burden” and instruct—and colonize—“new-caught sullen peoples.” Ray Stannard Baker described America’s victory as the beginning of the “American Renasance” [sic] and claimed that the engagement tore away the curtain of provincialism, but Tarbell thought the whole episode could have been avoided.
She saw Senator Hoar grow morose over America’s post-victory trend toward imperialism. Hoar felt that helping Cuba toward self-rule would have been a greater manifestation of the Declaration of Independence than the annexation and crushing of the Philippines’ own government to guarantee trade. In a spectacular expression of this sentiment, House Speaker Thomas B. Reed resigned from public life rather than participate in the subversion of American principles.
Watching such men clash with imperialists, Tarbell became involved in the changing idea of America and how journalism might be a public service: “I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen.”31 She decided to stay and be of use.
Tarbell had already accomplished much professionally by concentrating solely on her work. Whether in Washington, New York, or on a business trip, the job occupied her to the exclusion of nearly everything else. She answered business letters by return mail, while social notes could take months. She knew there was more to life than work and that those things mattered, but they did not matter enough for her to change her way of life. She sometimes regretted the friends she had not talked to, the plays she had not seen, the walks she had not taken. She was often exhausted, but she seemed not to feel she was misspending her life, nor did she seem to resent that her best energy went into her work.
She once apologized to Herbert B. Adams: “No one has any right to be so busy he cannot enjoy his friends and that I have been. Even here in New York where there is everything I love to tempt me out—pictures, music and the play, I have hardened my heart and hid myself in a boarding house. I am about done, now, however, and shall begin to stretch my legs again.”32
Ida was much too caught up in working during this period to visit Titusville more than a few times a year, so her family went to her. Franklin Tarbell was fascinated by his daughter’s researches into Lincoln. When he went to see her in Washington he would stop off to visit Civil War battlefields in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or West Virginia. He wrote her enthusiastically of Antietam which he toured with a driver: “The National Cemetery is magnificent and there are a
bout two hundred tablets giving a description of the location and maenovers of every core division briggade batter & etc. [sic]. It rained steadily almost all the time we were out and he only charged me $1.50 for horse and drive. I wish you had been along with me Thursday.”
Franklin Tarbell apparently introduced himself to his driver, a Confederate veteran named Furss, as the father of Ida Tarbell, for Franklin mentioned in his letter: “He read your Napoleon articles and would like to see you …” He closed saying he’d promised Furss she would send him a copy of McClure’s. Ida helped finance her father’s trips by sending him the magazine’s railroad passes, and he was scrupulous about returning one he did not need so it could be credited to the company.33 Franklin may have been too shy to meet many of her new and accomplished friends. Gertrude Hubbard once invited her and Franklin to a Geographic Society reception, but Ida declined, saying that her father asked to be excused since he was “so full of his subject [Gettysburg which they had traveled together] that he couldn’t consider another project.”34 None of her surviving correspondence indicates that any of the McClure gang met him, although they seemed to have heard much from her about his fine traits.
When Franklin was away from home, Esther went to Hatch Hollow where she had lived with her parents. The elder Tarbells were not a couple that traveled together. Possibly a part of the value of a break in routine was separation from each other. Esther wrote her daughter she was sure the change would do Franklin good. She said she would love to live in Hatch Hollow except that it would bore Ida’s father and the winter would be too severe. She would not turn farmer or hermit in her last days: “I indured [sic] enough at Rouseville for all the rest of my life.”35
Just as it had during their Rouseville days, the oil business continued to rule the Tarbell family. Ida encouraged her father’s excursions because they eased his bitterness over the decreasing value of his oil leases. Her brother Will wrote that he shared her concern about their father, but he added: “You couldn’t keep him still—he’s bound to bang ahead. He gets entirely worn out and almost sick but I don’t believe he’ll ever stop hustling and his hard luck makes him so much more restless. It’s the way with business though, like playing cards. You won’t lose with a great temptation to plunge occasionally. We’ll keep him off as much as we can, but the trouble is production won’t stay up unless you keep fiddling with it and drilling … Often I wish I was in some other business and if I ever hit it rich … you bet I’ll put most of it into something safe.”36
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