IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Despite his words to Ida, safety seems not to have been Will Tarbell’s style. He had become a leader in the fight against the Standard through his key role in the Pure Oil Company, a combination formed by independents. As secretary and treasurer, Will was the general auditor of the entire system of accounts in the United States and Europe. Lewis Emery, an oilman and Tarbell neighbor, described Will as “a man upon whom we rely more than on any other person connected with the Pure Oil Company.”37

  Will was apparently quite supportive of his elder sister and proud of her success. He encouraged her to map out a plan to get a percentage of the magazine as well as her salary. Indeed, McClure did give her a small share of the magazine, but whether it was because she asked for it or because he wanted to reward her—he had also rewarded Jaccaci with shares—is not certain.

  Will’s young son Scott boasted so much about his aunt that one of his playmates, Rubie Ley, decided she must have a picture of Titusville’s celebrity. Rubie appeared at the Tarbell’s front door, bearing her Brownie Kodak, when Ida was there. Tarbell, understanding how important it was to the child, helped Rubie take a professional portrait. “When Miss Tarbell sensed my earnestness, she did not laugh. She said that she would be glad to pose for me, but that she was tired so I must not be disappointed if the picture was not good,” Rubie Ley recalled. Tarbell asked her to return the next morning when the light would be better. Dressed as if for the office in a shirtwaist dress with a high starched collar, a watch pinned to her breast—Tarbell folded her hands, looked seriously into the camera, and stood very still. As Ley remembered, “I took two shots [since she said] ‘one might not be good.’ I bowed awkwardly and said, ‘Thank you, Miss Tarbell.’” But Ida had her in for cookies and lemonade that dispelled the child’s awe. Having arrived to photograph Miss Tarbell, she departed calling her Aunt Ida.

  “Aunt Sarah,” Ida’s sister, was far less interested in children, according to her grandnieces, and at this time was even removed from Titusville itself. Sarah’s opportunity to see Europe came in 1897 when she went with Ida, who used this occasion to visit American diplomats who were veterans of both sides of the Civil War and who might have some firsthand knowledge of Lincoln. Ida was particularly interested in following up a rumor that Lincoln had written personally to Queen Victoria asking her not to recognize the Confederacy. Tarbell pursued this as far as she could, and finally agreed with Lincoln’s son that Lincoln would not have undermined his secretary of state by writing to another head of government outside official channels.

  Whenever Ida was not working, the two sisters vacationed. They went to England, where they pedaled their bicycles thirty miles from Oxford to Stratford; to Switzerland; to France, where they rendezvoused with Hazen in Loches; and then to Paris, where Ida introduced Sarah to Mme Marillier and Charles Seignobos. Ida’s return to Paris could only have been an emotional one. She had left there with a third-class passage and her shoes barely soled. Now she was one of America’s best-known writers and her biography of Mme Roland, dedicated to Cécile Marillier, had been published the year before. The Marillier-Seignobos establishment was agog to see her and rejoiced in her success, as letters attest. The talkative Seignobos could not have failed to expound on the major topic of the day—the condemnation of a Jewish army officer for treason in behalf of Germany. Seignobos, along with some of his leading students and Émile Zola, was engaged in the fight to exonerate Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and they eventually succeeded.

  After Ida left, Sarah stayed in Paris to study painting. Later she decided she would prefer the Prado to the Louvre and moved to Madrid where, consciously or not, she lived out of the shadow of her elder sister’s fame and friendships.

  The summer Ida and Sarah went to Europe, they visited McClure and his family in Beuzeval-Houlgate, a spa in northwestern France. McClure was not well. He was suffering from dyspepsia and insomnia, nervous ailments resulting from overwork. To no one’s surprise, he suffered a physical breakdown. “It had come to the point where I had either to die or give up my work and go away for a while and I decided to do the latter,”38 McClure explained to a reporter.

  John Phillips took over for him. McClure was like a raven—quick-witted, shrewd, and bold, but Phillips was an owl—knowledgeable and quiet. He had wide eyes that gazed through spectacles, thinning hair, and an upturned mustache covering a firmly pinched mouth. Phillips was one of those people most accurately described in the passive voice. Things happened to him, were done to him, but he was seldom the active agent. That was Sam McClure’s role. Phillips and McClure had been partners since their days at Knox College when they and Albert Brady, later the magazine’s advertising manager, took over the student newspaper. Phillips, a doctor’s son, had a comfortable upbringing and, as noted, planned to be a professor until he joined McClure’s syndicate. Phillips soon found, however, that although McClure thought he had eighteen hundred dollars to fund the project, he had only six hundred.

  Phillips, while seldom the bearer of good news, was essential to McClure because he was practical and willing to stay in place while McClure gyrated between New York and the rest of the world. By the time Tarbell met him, Phillips was possessed of a wife, small children, and a secret—his first wife, a girl from his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, had hanged herself. The second Mrs. John S. Phillips, Jennie, stayed in the background. A McClure’s staffer described her thus: “… a little woman not without a sort of distinction, tho’ it is far from the kind that rests on mental fireworks.”39

  Phillips installed his family in Duxbury, Massachusetts for the summer and in Goshen, New York, for the rest of the year. During the week he lived in town devoting himself to the magazine and the lives of the staff.

  Phillips, who in his letters exhorted males to be “manly,” which in that era was a notion comprising self-reliance, chivalry, and honesty, was also a man possessed by fears. He always remembered his shock upon hearing that one of the finest young men in his hometown was an embezzler, and Phillips feared that he too might break loose and do a shameful act. In his thirties, he took as his motto “Hope little, work much, expect nothing.”

  Tarbell was at first intimidated by Phillips’s seriousness. When he paid her a courtesy call in Washington, she was so flustered that, although it was morning, she offered him a beer. But when McClure left on his extended rest, Phillips and Tarbell began to get to know each other better. They grew sufficiently friendly that he confessed that when he saw her free-lance articles from Paris, written in a self-conscious hand, he had decided she was a middle-aged New England schoolteacher and she laughed about how stupid she felt when she realized she had offered him a beer for breakfast.

  Tarbell trusted Phillips’s caution in ways she never trusted McClure’s praise. McClure, bubbling over with love and admiration for her and other writers, could tell Ida when her articles did not work, but the harried and taciturn Phillips knew how to fix them. She felt that this man alone was smart enough to discover her secret—she was really no writer, no matter what everyone said. “You very rarely praised—there was little to praise,” she once wrote him. “I can still tell just where you sat when you said the first appreciative word on something in an article. It pulled me up like the Dickens—of course nobody knew that, I was buried in gloom most of the time and I hated and doubted myself and wanted to get back to Paris. I wasn’t long in realizing your eye on everything—you were our friendly authority.”40 Indeed, the staff whispered that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.

  Indeed, McClure could drive his associates to near frenzy. After his long rest restored him, he bounced back with such vigor that he overextended himself and his publishing house. Besides the syndicate, the magazine and the short-lived quarterly, McClure prepared to publish an encyclopedia, then abandoned the idea. In 1897, he and Frank Doubleday started Doubleday & McClure Co. to publish books. Each dollar McClure acquired was twice spent—first for settling old debts, then for expansion, which
always incurred new liabilities.

  A dubious opportunity presented itself in 1899 when J. P. Morgan offered McClure Harper & Brothers publishing house to add to Doubleday & McClure. The financier had purchased Harper to save its textbook division, but found it was not returning a sufficient profit on his investment. “The General,” as they nicknamed McClure, leaped at the chance to control Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, and Round Table for children, but as new men and new ambitions wedged themselves into the tight circle of old friends, hairline cracks in the organization threatened to fissure. Brady in particular was offended when Doubleday was given a larger share of the business than Brady had. It was all too much for McClure, who went to Johns Hopkins Hospital and then to France to guard his strength.41

  Phillips, who was diagnosed as having a rapid heartbeat, supervised the complicated dealings with the Harper concern. After several months, business manager Brady convinced others of what he had seen at the beginning: in buying Harper’s they were simply buying a debt. The escape clause Brady had insisted on released them from the contract. Late in the year, Doubleday, whose vaulting ambition McClure had started to distrust, resigned to form Doubleday, Page & Co. with former McClure associate Walter Page.

  In the midst of all these upheavals, McClure had summoned Ida Tarbell back to New York from Washington to act as editor of McClure’s. Her actual title was “managing editor,” but the staff called the post “desk editor,” for she never left the office. Her change in status required her to handle Phillips tactfully, but it did free him for the ongoing Harper negotiations. Tarbell had watched McClure’s expansion with alarm. Most men in the firm had neither liked nor trusted Doubleday, but Tarbell thought he was needed. She later wrote McClure from Clifton Springs, where she took her turn at trying to rest: “I do not like to see Mr. Doubleday and Mr. Page go. They are strong men in their way and would relieve you and Mr. Phillips of much heavy care you will have to bear … but you know the situation and I do not and you have a magician’s skill in pulling things out so I know it will be alright in the end.”42

  Tarbell arrived in New York in mid-May of 1899, in time to settle in for a torrid summer. Her departure from Washington was so hasty that she left arrangements for her apartment to be handled by a secretary. Indeed, it was some time before she was sure that the move to New York was a permanent one.

  She found an apartment in Greenwich Village at 40 West Ninth Street, twenty blocks from the office. She chose this quarter, faced in brownstone and graced by foliage, because it gave her a scent of Paris. She frequented two nearby hotel restaurants, the Brevoort, favored by the English, and the Griffou where French was spoken and meals were good and inexpensive. Both places were patronized by a literary crowd, including Mark Twain, who became a pleasant acquaintance, and Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, an art critic and historian, who became a friend. Born Mariana Griswold in 1851 to an old family in the China trade, she married within her class. After she was widowed at the age of thirty-three, Mrs. Van Rensselaer began to write on such topics as English cathedrals, architecture, and the history of gardening. When her only son died at the age of twenty-one in 1894, she took up settlement work and labored to improve public education. A perfectionist in her writing, Mrs. Van Rensselaer said little about herself but came out firmly against woman suffrage, insisting that women should concentrate on their families. Tarbell was mindful of the difference between her own background and that of her wealthy friend: “She belonged to such a different world, but there was always a bridge over and we came and went naturally on it.”43 It was probably Mrs. Van Rensselaer who convinced Tarbell to become a member, although inactive, of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

  Tarbell’s home, which she furnished simply but with as much elegance as she could afford, had a large living room with windows reaching to the floor, a small dining room, and two bedrooms, of which the larger became her study. To care for it and her two cats when she was away, she hired an Irish maid.44

  Her domestic tranquility was a contrast to the office. Ida’s responsibilities as editor were first to see that McClure’s instructions were carried out, that production and copyediting departments functioned smoothly, and that the magazine remained lively and vital. Above all, she was not to let a good writer get away. Such judgment is always subject to luck and, like most others at that time, she rejected the work of Theodore Dreiser, but in a very nice way: “I like it very much. I did not consider it, however, a McClure article. I should think it a good Century or possible Harper’s Magazine article, and it certainly will lend itself admirably to illustration.”45

  Tarbell’s authority was temporary, but it was assured. Viola Roseboro, McClure’s literary editor, noted: “When I first knew her in the McClure’s office, remotely enough for she had no idea of letting me close—her life largely consisted in holding people off—one of the things I sharply noted and watched with pleasure was the attitude toward her of the office full of young men. She was above them all in power and had a certain tacit authority over them, tacit because she was not in a [permanent] executive position. Another woman who was with us for a time demonstrated how offensive authority in a woman could be to such males. She was an executive. They all detested her and her assumed masculinity. IMT they doted on and frankly looked up to, accepting her innate power as above all theirs and entitling her to authority. She was with them just as you see her with anybody today … I quite thought in those days that she was a good deal older than I was. I am sure she did not look it, but she seemed to the naked eye to have no coquetteries at all.”46

  Ida Tarbell was not one to be cozy in an office atmosphere. Lunches with favorites continued, but she did not allow time for those who would merely sap her energy, nor had she ever. In Paris, once her American friends left, her personal life had centered around Mme Marillier, who was the great-granddaughter of the woman she was writing about. In Washington, Tarbell quit the Patterson boardinghouse which she loved so well because she needed time alone to recoup her strength.

  So it was in New York. She was conscious that she hurt other people by her reserve—“I always feel brutal when I don’t do what the other person wants,”47 she once admitted—but she remained quietly unavailable when women on the staff offered chatty friendships.

  At this time the McClure enterprises took up a city block on Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth streets, two blocks from the city’s main shopping thoroughfare on Twenty-third. When Ida Tarbell’s desk became the chief operating one, McClure’s had, in the words of William Allen White, the air of a wholesale silk outlet or a hardware business. He thought the tony Scribner’s office was like “some ancient volume of forgotten lore” where McClure’s was an “unexpurgated dictionary of tomorrow.” The McClure’s headquarters was full of clutter and noise and bustle and the latest gadgets of efficiency from typewriters to Dictaphones and pneumatic tubes.48

  The printing press was so advanced that it had a bell to ring out when it needed paper. The thing nonplussed Mark Twain—almost. When he heard it sounding for help he asked if it could vote. Rudyard Kipling was so taken by the huge elevator, which held a delivery truck and horses, that he sneaked off to play with the switches by himself and piloted himself to another floor whereupon the printer turned around, found him gone, and feared that the prized author had fallen down the elevator shaft.

  Stephen Crane often dropped by to perch on Ray Stannard Baker’s desk, draw his knees to his chin, and wrap his long arms around his legs. A pale, slim, tired fellow, he was ever cynical, but always interesting. Then there were all the people McClure had hired and didn’t need. The more talented eventually slunk away to other jobs, but at five o’clock the place was overrun by charwomen who had touched McClure with hard-luck stories.

  Art director August Jaccaci inspired much speculation. He was rumored to have painted the Havana Opera House murals and to have killed an opponent in a duel in Mexico. A da
rk exotic man, he looked Italian, Greek, or perhaps Polish. Forty years later it was learned he was a Gypsy. He was affable and so desirous of being helpful that he often interfered with writers and forgot his own duties in the art department. His sudden storms of temper were legendary and sometimes rained on Ida. McClure complained that, unlike Miss Tarbell, Jac constantly needed supervision. He was on his way out for years, saved by one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock McClure had given him in a generous moment.

  Booth Tarkington described the Jaccaci treatment and accent in a letter home. He said Jaccaci had met him with a joyous howl—“Ha, ha! It iss You!” He tossed Tarkington’s coat, hat, and stick on a pile of manuscripts and said, “We haf waited for you! And so it iss you.” Tarbell (“a tall woman … a nice woman”), Jaccaci, and McClure took Tarkington to lunch. Tarkington observed: “Jaccaci is great and Miss T. very clever and all very friendly … The lunch was long & delightful & when it was over it was almost time to dress for dinner.”49

  They summoned Tarkington to New York because of his tale, “The Gentleman from Indiana,” about a small-town newspaper editor’s fight against corruption. McClure’s legend was that when the manuscript arrived, Viola Roseboro, with tears streaming from her eyes, approached McClure, saying, “Here is a story sent from God Almighty to save McClure’s Magazine.” Everyone had his or her own version of the quote, but all gave “Rosie” credit for her excellent judgment.