Now she saw she had been duped. The Standard learned about competitors not from snatches of gossip and publicly posted freight lists, but from an organized illegal strategy. “Some way the unravelling of this espionage charge, the proofs of it, turned my stomach against the Standard in a way that the indefensible and robust fights over transportation had never done. There was a littleness about it that seemed utterly contemptible compared to the immense genius and ability that had gone into the organization. Nothing about the Standard had ever given me the feeling that did,”43 she told a women’s group.
Siddall produced testimony that corroborated the spy charges. A Mr. Wall told him that Standard employees had come forward in Baltimore, Louisville, and Toledo to confess that railwaymen were being paid to provide shipping information. Siddall said a Baltimore oilman awaited her arrival to produce more information and off she went to see him.
In truth, the cloak-and-dagger tale about a Sunday-school teacher that Tarbell reported may have been a cover. She sought always to protect the identity of her informant and the one to tell her about the espionage may well have been Siddall’s man from Baltimore. His name, Fehsenfeld, appears in her correspondence but is not used in The History of the Standard Oil Company.
After she had studied the Baltimore shipping records, she again asked Rogers if the Standard engaged in any espionage with the help of railroad agents. He reiterated that they did everything they could to get information legally and fairly, and called her idea of spying nonsense.
Tarbell knew better. She published the story of Standard’s espionage network in February 1904, and since she showed how it undercut rivals, she called it “Cutting to Kill.” “The only time in all my relations with him when I saw his face white with rage,”44 was the way she described Rogers’s demeanor after it appeared. He ended her visits to 26 Broadway.
The animus of Rogers, the spleen of Rockefeller’s brother, and the wreck of many lives weighed upon her. Her respite was the continuity of her family. Because of research, she spent more time in Titusville than she had since college, but only one description of her visits survives: “When I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday afternoon, reproved me in this gentle way. ‘You shouldn’t read that on Sunday, Ida.’ I quickly exchanged it for Pilgrim’s Progress which is not without a suggestion for a student of the trust.”
Ida and her father shared a dry and quiet wit. Once when he was confined to bed he wrote her: “I have studied up sciatica some and the authorities contradict one another so much I don’t know what to do. One says exercise all you can. Another keep still. One doctor here in town says rub it like sixty. Another says don’t rub it it will make it worse so I have tried to average it.… Your mother is around, was downtown yesterday and over to Will’s three times. She is keeping busy looking after her flowers and dog. The dog gives her more trouble than I do but she spends all her breath scolding him and I am let down easy.”45
To keep in still closer touch with her family, Ida invited her nieces to visit her in New York. When they were children, she hired a Frenchwoman to show them the town while she was at work. They went to museums, Coney Island, Wall Street, and department stores: “Aunt Ida planned for us to do everything a child never having been out of a small town would want to do in New York City,” Clara said. In the evenings, Ida took them to dine with friends, especially the Phillipses. She probably also took the girls to see melodramas. She told a reporter from San Diego that she had developed a taste for them while writing about Standard Oil: “I love to hiss the villain,” she said.
Clara remembered Ida’s enthusiasm: “Her interest and joy in [our] daily experiences were as great as ours,” but Clara also remembered how displeased Ida was when they criticized others and when Esther allowed herself to get fat. Considering this a weakness of character, Ida scolded until Esther cried and Ida contritely bought her a present. However Ida lectured the girl thereafter, she made it a point never to mention Esther’s girth to others.46
Ida frequently saw Will who was now living in Philadelphia where the Pure Oil Company was headquartered. A friend recalled the evening Ida arranged a dinner for four at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. While three of them waited for Will, Ida boasted that her brother was the only man who had successfully fought the Rockefellers and that he was often so busy they had to make an appointment three weeks in advance. Then, after dinner, Will entertained them by reading from a Southern newspaper that he had found on the train. It was a poem describing the harm Ida had done John D. Rockefeller. The refrain—“Oh, Ida, how could you do such a thing?”—had them in fits of laughter, but Ida seemed embarrassed and wriggled restlessly in her chair.
Handsome in his youth, Will Tarbell in middle age was balding and dependent on eyeglasses. Although he was much occupied by his work, which had taken him to Germany to set up oil markets, he was still an avid outdoorsman. He even wrote verses about his hunting dogs. Ella Tarbell Price, his granddaughter, recalls coming across a box of his treasured photographs of dogs, fish, and game. There were none of his children, and only one of his wife.
Will was proud of Ida’s success and seemed to feel no surprise that his sister had become a national figure. They traded information about the Standard; Will reviewed her manuscript, gave her leads and introductions, and was most devoted when she needed encouragement.
There is no sign that he felt the same about Sarah. As Franklin and Esther Tarbell grew older, it became apparent that they needed someone to take care of them. Once Will moved to Philadelphia, he couldn’t see that they were cared for, so, as head of the household, he chose between his sisters. He decided that Ida was necessary where she was, and summoned Sarah home from Europe. She closed her studio and returned dutifully to Titusville’s cloudy days. She painted a portrait of Esther reading by gas lamp that found its way to the home of her grandniece Caroline Tarbell Tupper. Overall, the painting evokes the maternal roundness of a Mary Cassatt.
For Sarah’s sacrifice, Ida was ever grateful and guilty, according to her grandnieces. In earlier days, Ida would exorcise some of her concern through work, but as the series dragged on, it took her to the heart of all she had been avoiding. Writing, even when it was not going well, had once been her drug and tonic, but now she was writing of her own people, of their impotence, gullibility, and defeat.
The more Tarbell became celebrated, the more she felt beset. “In writing my Standard Oil chapters my sympathies have been mightily worked upon until I have suffered over again the defeats of these independent refiners,” she admitted.
She said this to Gilbert H. Montague who published it in the January 6, 1904, Boston Transcript. Montague was the young Harvard law student who had written the defense of the Standard. The two met in an atmosphere of friendliness, probed the rival’s sources and intentions, and parted determined to discredit the other. Tarbell saw that Montague had not researched as fully as she had and alluded to this in McClure’s. He dismissed her as a journalist who could not see the historical growth of the oil industry as the development of the Middle States through the agency of the railways.
The controversies brought her increased attention. At one point an impetuous, and perhaps not too stable, stranger showed up at the office telling Ida to get her hat—he was marrying her and taking her to live in the Midwest. But even those who knew her well began to see her in a new light. Hazen wrote that she was becoming as much a household word as “Hamilton or the Only Theodore … the one false note you strike is in your innuendo against marriage, the one perfect institution in the world.” He said that he and his wife bragged a bit about their friendship with her. They had placed their author’s copies of her work where everyone could see them and they could nonchalantly say they knew the author.
McClure professed awe: “Your articles are the great magazine feature of recent years. The way you are generally esteemed and reverenced pleases me tremendously. You are today th
e most generally famous woman in America. You have achieved a great distinction. People universally speak of you with such a reverence that I am getting sort of afraid of you.” Later he reported from Europe: “Everywhere even in obscure local journals your work is constantly mentioned—both in Geneva and Lausanne papers have arrived on your work in connection with Standard Oil.”47
But her fame did not bring her invitations to all events. An exclusion that rankled her was the Periodical Publishers’ Dinner, a stag affair. McClure, Baker, Steffens, Phillips, and Boyden dined with the president, the secretary of state, foreign ambassadors, and senators, but the celebrated Ida Tarbell was not even present. “It is the first time since I came into the office that the fact of petticoats has stood in my way and I am half inclined to resent it,”48 she grumbled.
At this same time the air in the office warmed, bubbled, and simmered with crisis. Sam McClure was having an affair. It did not remain his personal dilemma nor a private problem for his wife; the entire office became embroiled. As Sam McClure grew more successful and his own youth faded, he established his French summer home as a way station for young writers. In 1903, he had invited Cale and Alice Hegan Rice, he a playwright, she the author of the best-selling Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, to spend part of their honeymoon on a walking tour of the Alps.
For the first part of the trip, as Mrs. McClure shopped in Paris, a young poet named Florence Wilkinson joined the Rices and McClure on the hike. They went to Chamonix where McClure arranged for the honeymooners to be on a different floor so that all might have a view of Mont Blanc. Just before Ida joined the party, McClure’s “Firenze” left. The re-formed group donned rucksacks at the foot of the Rhone glacier and hiked along the river, sleeping in farmhouses and tramping Alpine roads. Ida always described herself as happiest in the mountains, but McClure’s dalliance weighed so heavily upon her that when they parted in Bergamo in the Italian Alps she was holding back tears. McClure joined his wife at Divonne-les-Bains near Geneva and Ida accompanied the honeymooners to Venice. At some point she and the Rices must have broken down to gossip about the General, for reference to “Firenze” spiced their correspondence for decades. The couple, who became Ida’s dear friends, nicknamed the writer “Julie” for reasons no one knows today.
After Venice she sailed home with McClure and his wife and helped them to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. However calmly she seemed to take McClure’s behavior, inwardly she had much to think about. For years, by turns brotherly and worshipful, McClure had been rhapsodizing over her smile and telling Tarbell he loved her—“I have always cared for you in a special manner, as much as a man can care for a woman without actually loving her,”49 he wrote.
Just before that summer, in March 1903, he had written her a solicitous letter from Europe saying that he missed her and wanted to live near her and be with her during the coming years. He professed, “I want you to live your life and be just as happy as a woman can be in your way. I am so anxious about you I want to see you better circumstanced.”50
If she had ever read more into such communications than they warranted, she could not now. Ida probably would not have wanted an affair with McClure, but she had to note that in Florence Wilkinson he found a woman who swept aside whatever scruples he may have had.
Normally Europe revitalized her, but Ida returned home tired and rapidly became more and more exhausted. The Standard Oil series was published as fast as she could write—and rewrite—it. Each installment was a wonder of transition, one flowed into another and was made to amplify the preceding one whether it did naturally or not. As her energy flagged, Tarbell was so late in handing in some chapters that Siddall had no time to review them.
More and more Ida Tarbell leaned on Phillips and transferred to him the affection she had felt for McClure. Phillips, in turn, unburdened himself to her. His wife, following the birth of their fifth child and only son in 1900, was often ill. To this was added the weight of McClure’s absences, orders, and criticisms. As the two partners became estranged, the staff, especially Tarbell, sided with Phillips.
At Christmas, Ida gave Phillips her photo. She said she felt embarrassed, but he had asked for it and he was the one person she took at his word. She was emboldened to declare her feeling: “It [the photo] carries with it my profound wish for your happiness. You deserve happiness if anyone does for your courage, your truthfulness and your gentleness. You unconsciously strengthen everybody who comes near you. Someday I hope you will get what you deserve in freedom of care and in joy of life. I wouldn’t have dared say this to your face perhaps but it is often in my heart to say it. If it sounds expansive, please remember it is Christmas and that expansion is one of its effects.”51
The letters she wrote McClure when she was fond of him—as least those that have survived—radiate with self-assured admiration, but her letters to Phillips after her disillusion with McClure shyly offer her heart.
She knew Phillips well. They had seen each other daily for years. She knew his footsteps, the tilt of his head, and could anticipate his reaction to every situation. Moreover, they shared what was most vital to them—their work. This bond held her as no other, although it is clear she could have forged ties to other men if she had wished.
Even beyond the McClure set, she had a rich social life: “It is doubtful whether any other woman in New York is welcomed in so many or so varied social circles as she,” noted one profile in The Reader. A few months later this same magazine added: “It has been said that Miss Ida Tarbell is the most popular woman in America, and even dissenters from that opinion will admit the choice lies between [sic] her, Miss Jane Addams and Miss Helen Gould [a philanthropist].”52
Men liked her very much. One admirer was Albert G. Robinson, a newspaperman two years older than she. Orphaned as a boy, he was self-educated but polished. He had reported on the Spanish-American War for the New York Evening Post and went on to become an editorial writer for the New York Sun. When he was transferred from New York to Washington, he said his chief regret was the interruption of his friendship with Ida Tarbell. He wrote her: “The move entails certain losses, and I count among them a certain number of evenings which I had hoped and expected to spend on West 9th Street this winter, getting better acquainted with—your cat.”53
Her own success had given Ida Tarbell the confidence to be as much at home with notables as with the people of Titusville. Evenings of lively conversation were happy antidotes to work. She was charming, avid to hear what others had to say, and to comment on it—sometimes she felt at too great length.
Roseboro thought Tarbell often led a conversation in order to steer it from personal matters. She observed: “She has got in the habit of protecting herself from people that way, and the other side is that when she gets with the people who have what she wants [to know about] she is masterly in keeping them talking.” Roseboro lamented that Tarbell expressed herself less forcefully as a writer than she did in someone’s parlor.54
Tarbell also was greatly empathetic. She had the intuitive gift of understanding others’ feelings. Henry S. Pritchett, a noted astronomer and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a great admirer. Among her family papers are several letters from him in which he attempted to rearrange his schedule so they might have a friendly chat. Possibly for propriety’s sake, he always took care to mention his wife’s hopes to see her as well. Pritchett was especially warm after she wrote him a note on the eve of his installment at MIT. He wrote: “I am taking a moment from the preparations of tomorrow to thank you for a helping hand-grasp. After all, we know some friends better in months than others in years and to them we instinctively give our confidence. I like to consider you as on that list …”55
Ida’s friendships with males were sufficiently numerous that the novelist Mary Austin took note. Austin, much admired for her stories of the West, was so confident of her own genius that a critic carped that she had an empress complex. Eleven years younger than Tarbell, sh
e was quite round, divorced, and very vocal about her hopes of finding another husband. In fact, at one point she went after Lincoln Steffens. Ida had seen many men fly from Austin’s attentions, and she was taken aback when Austin told her: “You often have men to lunch. Different men. I don’t know men. Why can’t you take me and introduce me?” Tarbell was very matter-of-fact about her business lunches: “Men were as impersonal as the pitcher on the table,” she said, then added, “but they always had a good time.”56
Her private life did not ease her struggles with the Standard articles. She uncovered one letter showing that Mark Hanna, President McKinley’s closest adviser, had intervened to protect Rockefeller from prosecution in Ohio, but she let one of her sources persuade her that disclosure would literally kill Hanna. She capitulated and instantly knew she had degraded herself.
She made a report on the matter for the McClure’s files and said: “He [her source, David K. Watson, an Ohio lawyer] got me where he could make a plea to me on the ground of my obligation to him and I have a sense of defeat that I have not had in any other single incident in the conduct of this work.” Hanna died in February 1904, but McClure’s honored Tarbell’s promise and withheld a sensational disclosure. Out of respect for the dead, they delayed one of Steffens’s articles criticizing Hanna. After such a glorious romp of exposé, the editors, especially the young ones, felt they had been reined in. Boyden wrote Siddall: “We are all much depressed over Hanna.”57
In early spring 1904, Ida began a study of the price of oil to show how Standard’s control allowed it to create false shortages and boost its prices. To her dismay, she found she could not condense and arrange all the material with her old skill. Scheduled for May, the article was postponed until June and finally ran in September. Will, whose help and advice she had sought throughout the project, wrote her sympathetically: “I guess you are something like me, a little stale and need a few days fishing. Don’t be at all discouraged over your article. It’s going to be good. [It’s] strong now as it is, but you can get it stronger.”58
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