IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Tarbell saw that Rockefeller had triumphed and that her own victory, however moral, was hollow. It was this she recognized, not that nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled in favor of her life’s work. She went on to new subjects, but she released information damaging to Rockefeller whenever she could. Three months after her series ran, the Bureau of Corporations, later known as the Federal Trade Commission, investigated petroleum transportation and she made some of her papers available to Commissioner James R. Garfield.67

  His report of May 1906 elaborated on her exposé and found that the railroads had indeed discriminated on behalf of Standard Oil, crushing its rivals and allowing the oil trust to harvest three-quarters of a million dollars a year from the railroads. President Roosevelt fumed in a broad-side to Congress: “Of course the ultimate result is that it obtains a much larger profit at the expense of the public … This immediate correction, partial or complete, of the evil of the secret rates is of course on the one hand an acknowledgment that they were wrong, and yet were persevered in until exposed; and on the other hand a proof of the efficiency of the work that has been done by the Bureau of Corporations.” The president did not see fit to give credit to the work done by independent journalists.68

  Tarbell exulted when religious and educational institutions questioned taking money as tainted as Rockefeller’s. She gladly armed the Reverend Washington Gladden, the influential Congregational minister, with facts she had gleaned about Rockefeller’s character and business methods.69 She jumped in when Congress investigated Rockefeller’s role in developing the Mesabi iron range in Minnesota. She wrote Congressman William Kent: “A whole pipeline system, the Mellon Pipe, from Pittsburgh to the seaboard was swept into the Standard by the same kind of operation. They never made such a hauling. I wish the committee would get this before the public—of course this is confidential to you. I would not be willing to appear in it in any way.”70

  Never did she seem to understand that her cry against predatory competition was finally turned into law. The Hepburn Act of 1906 provided for more efficient control over railroad rates and classified pipeline companies as common carriers that were to treat all customers equally. The Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 gave greater power to the Interstate Commerce Commission to control pipeline rates. In 1914, the Federal Trade Commission Act was created to police business practices and the Clayton Act prohibited unfair competition that tended to promote monopoly. Within a decade, virtually all the abuses she had pinpointed were proscribed.

  As the years passed, The History of the Standard Oil Company lost its immediacy, but the urgency never receded for Tarbell. In the 1930s, she took a young history professor, Dr. Paul Giddens, and his wife to lunch at the National Arts Club. “Tell me,” he asked, making conversation, “if you could rewrite your book today, what would you change?” Fifty years after their conversation, he vividly recalled that her eyes flashed. She emphatically set down her knife and fork and answered: “Not one word, young man, not one word.”71

  Eight

  Unexplored Land

  John D. Rockefeller was not the only one to feel the brunt of Tarbell’s anger; there was still some left for Sam McClure. She, Phillips, and Boyden took it upon themselves to try to curb his philandering. They felt his conduct made the preeminent journal of exposé itself a target for exposure. By loosening his morality, McClure had stepped outside their circle and seemed to be betraying McClure’s Magazine. Tarbell, Phillips, and Boyden were by turns a cabal promoting their own views and a vice squad of Keystone Kops.

  McClure’s dalliance became an office scandal after he directed poetry editor Witter Bynner to publish Florence Wilkinson’s work and to deliver personally the acceptance letter with a bouquet of flowers. On Bynner’s return from the lady’s doorstep, Ida summoned him into her office for a counsel of war. Phillips, Boyden, and she chastised him for helping McClure deceive his wife, then they turned on McClure. Under their questioning, the General admitted he had written compromising letters that, in the hands of someone like William Randolph Hearst, could damage the magazine and its moral credibility.

  Phillips hurried to Wilkinson, then vacationing in upstate New York, and extracted her promise that all correspondence would be returned. Wilkinson also offered to send future letters to McClure in care of his wife. When Hattie McClure agreed with this plan, Tarbell was shocked into expressing herself in bold language: “My dear Mr. Phillips—The Lord help us! I’m too small for this! There is nothing for us, I should say, but to keep up a ‘stern and unrelenting’ front. Evidently Mrs. McClure is not to be counted on for that. Letters under her convoy! He can persuade her to anything and if in the end we see a ménage à trois, I shall not be greatly surprised. But that wouldn’t last. He would soon want another!”1

  McClure apparently had tried to explain himself to Miss Tarbell and now in this letter Ida asked Phillips if perhaps they should pass some home truths on to Miss Wilkinson: “Would it not be wise to put his condition still more forcibly to her—to tell her of the other affairs, to make her feel that far from being the first and only one, there have been others, several of them—and the only reason they have not gone so far is that the other women have refused to travel and sky-lark with him? Why he told me himself, not a month before the break-up [a temporary lull in the romance] that it would have probably been the same with any woman that he cared for ‘if she had been as yielding as Miss W.’ It may be cruel to tell her this but we seem to be the only ones to use the knife and somebody must do it.”2

  Just as Ida had appointed herself to chaperone her roommates in Paris, so she itched to take charge now. She continued:

  “If you wish it and Miss W. will consent, I will go and see her and make an appeal for courage, etc. I fear I would be hard with her. I do not mind her romantic vein so much as I do the graft. I lost all my respect for her when I saw her wheedling money out of the Gen’l. I am not hard on those who love in defiance of the law—on the contrary—if it is a genuine thing. But this thing was too trivial and calculating to arouse sympathy at the start. But I will honestly try to put that out of my mind and help the girl if she will let me. I have had no answer yet to the letter sent last week. It is quite natural she should feel resentment toward me, but if it can be brought about it would be better for me to go … than for you … This is, of course, the most vital thing we have on hand and our inexperience in dealing with lunatics makes extra attention necessary!”

  They had reached the point of treating the General as a nuisance. Lincoln Steffens, back from some shameful city, was amazed. “I realized that those who had to live and work every day with him were learning to hate him.”3 When McClure was around, he was treated as their “play” editor. He barked orders that everyone pretended to obey with punctilio. Then they went to Phillips to find out what they really should do.

  Young Willa Cather, who was sincere when she called McClure by his nicknames—the General, the Chief—described in a short story titled “Ardessa” the hubris of the group. In this story, published in The Century in May 1918, she wrote of an editor, Marcus O’Mally, who “had built up about him an organization of which he was somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a ‘line’ to follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose—this was all in that good time when people were eager to read about their own wickedness—and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an authority. Other people—Napoleon, Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt—had discovered that advertising would go a long way; but Marcus O’Mally discovered that in America it would go all the way—as far as you wished to pay its passage. Any human countenance plastered in three-sheet posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the American people. The strangest thing was that the owners of these grave countenances, staring at their own faces on newsstands and billboards, fell
to venerating themselves; and even he, O’Mally, was more or less constrained by these reputations that he had created out of cheap paper and cheap ink.”

  Cather went on to describe this editor: “He left his dignified office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year while he played about on the outskirts of the social order.”

  If Phillips, Tarbell, and the others forgot their debts to the Chief, McClure also forgot what he owed the staff, especially to Phillips. McClure’s marital problems must have had particular poignancy for Phillips since Phillips had helped McClure to win his wife over the protestations of Hattie’s father, a Knox College professor. Later, Phillips’s father had mortgaged the family home to keep McClure’s going. But as friend and partner, Phillips was increasingly regarded by McClure as his lackey. His decisions were overruled, his layouts torn apart at the last minute. He had responsibility but no authority, and it grated upon him.

  Phillips simply irritated McClure. Phillips had allowed Jaccaci, the art director, to interfere in editorial matters until McClure felt obliged to fire him. Ever afterward, McClure found Phillips less and less trustworthy; but as he valued Phillips less, he valued Tarbell more. He depended on her to look after both the magazine and his family while he pursued other interests. In the spring of 1903, a weekend “retreat” was prepared for Ida at the McClure house in Ardsley, New York. McClure wrote his wife: “In buying things for Miss Tarbell’s room I want you to know that I told her that you were planning to make her a nice home there. Miss Tarbell did us great service in the past two or three years when Jac was planning to be the whole thing and Mr. Phillips was blind [as to how the office should be managed]. In case of my death she would be your mainstay as Mr. Phillips doesn’t realize other people’s unreliability & I shall be away a lot next year and you will enjoy having her out.”4

  As far as McClure was concerned, Ida Tarbell was still his most trusted ally, albeit a disappointed one. When business took him around the country, he wrote Ida from Kansas City that he bitterly regretted her change in feelings for him. He recalled how sad she had been at the end of their vacation with the Rices and said he thought he could stand the years of waiting until he regained her confidence.5

  McClure was chagrined that he had wounded her; he did not realize he had killed her love. He still seemed to think he had her total loyalty and blithely described to her a future in which she would permanently take the “ailing” Phillips’s place: “When your book [on Standard Oil] is finished Siddall will be able to do a lot in the Magazine and be of great service to you and Boyden,” he assured her. Other letters followed outlining how Baker and Steffens were to proceed with their stories and how promotional advertising, which he thought “weak and tasteless” under Phillips, was henceforth to be written.6

  McClure also wrote to Steffens and Baker directly so that Tarbell or Phillips sometimes found their suggestions countermanded. No one knew the General’s wishes until he breezed in to rip the copy from the printer’s hand or write from the Alps that nothing had been done according to his specifications. Ida saw Phillips grow thinner, more pinched.

  Hattie was also writing to Ida, telling of McClure’s progress and his trust in the guidance of his wife. Ida saw that she might be able to influence Hattie, at least, and wrote: “You are able to command him in a degree which amazes me. It is the triumph of the superior and moral nature and he doesn’t recognize your authority.”7 Ida said it hurt her to have intemperate orders roared in the office when Phillips had all the burdens, plus concern about Mr. McClure. “We need the man Mr. McClure is bound to be in a few months,” she assured Hattie. “But the wholesale criticism is taking the heart and enthusiasm out of Mr. Phillips.” She concluded by saying that she feared the office and business could not endure indefinitely the strains that were being put upon them.

  After receiving word from McClure telling her again how to administer the office, Tarbell gently but firmly let him know that he was accusing their friend of his own infirmities. She defended Phillips: “The trouble is that he has not the endurance to do, day in and day out, the kind of work he did yesterday and is doing to-day. But that is your trouble and my trouble, my dear Mr. McClure … He has all the different branches of the work in hand, which I have not, and of course, I never could get hold of them as he and you do. I will do everything I can to relieve and assist him, and if I honestly think that he ought to get away from it all I shall insist with all the strength I have, just as I do, you know, when I see you failing. At present things look very well and I do not think you need to worry about Mr. Phillips any more than perhaps we shall always have to be anxious about him, a man of delicate physical organization and of a still more delicate nature. The fact that Mr. Phillips is to be here will explain to you why it does not seem to me advisable to spend an hour or two a week in conference with the whole staff. If I were here alone I would do that, but when Mr. Phillips is here such a move naturally must come from him, just as it must come from you when you are here.”8

  As she struggled under the strains of the magazine, she thought she might be able to write her problems away by confiding them to a journal. She opened her small leather diary, took up her pen, and wrote:

  “May 5, 1905. Bought nearly two months ago and not a word written—bought as books of this kind have been before for a companion and so dead to life I could not use a companion. There has come a point where it is life or death-in-life—and I am not willing to give up life. If the innermost accesses are to be entered I must go there alone. I am conscious so much of myself is evading me. And this poor little book is a feeble prop in my effort to reach the land I’ve never explored.”9

  Her diary was a safety valve that allowed her to release her strongest emotions. Her first long entry there revealed a very flustered woman with a great reservoir of romantic love and no perspective when it came to a man who impressed her.

  Proximity, the hair on the back of a man’s neck, the touch of his hand or sleeve, were too palpable to kindle Tarbell’s soul. The idea of the unachievable, the removed, the person so lofty he seemed safely in another realm allowed her to adore before an altar of her own making. She longed to be overpowered in the place most meaningful to her—her mind. Carl Schurz, probably without conscious intent, had achieved this. It is likely that John Burroughs, the naturalist and essayist, did as well. His reflections on nature, his emulation of Emerson and Thoreau and friendship with Whitman, gave him a mythical stature. Burroughs also seemed to Ida to be as simple, sweet, and honest as her father. She began to visit him and his wife in the Catskills around 1900 when he was sixty-three.10

  No one, however, had the impact of Henry James. Some time early in 1905, she saw his portrait. She thought James’s face showed great sensitivity and comprehension, conquest and gravity. She noted especially his eyes, which seemed to see into deep matters: “I had looked at it [the portrait] many times and sighed he was unattainable. I have never read him much but I knew here was something big and wise and sweet—a soul to sit by as one does by a cathedral and let its power filter in.”

  James was at that time revisiting America after an absence of twenty years. Enthusiastic reception to The Golden Bowl brought him the opportunity to make a lecture tour. Having traveled through the South, the Midwest, and California, he was at the end of his journey and back for a last visit to New England. George W. Cable, then a prominent writer of stories set in the South, hosted a dinner to precede James’s lecture and invited the Hazens, the writer Gerald Stanley Lee and his wife, and Ida Tarbell.

  She at first declined the honor. She wrote in her diary: “All the rudeness—the ignorance, the imbecility, and inarticulateness of my life flared up in me and I blushed to think of sitting near. But they wanted me and I wanted to go. I dared to do it. I lay awake nights thinking of it. Afraid and eager. For I knew there was something there for me.”

  She so yearned for James’s esteem, it seemed that no one else’s had ever mattered. “It is a thirst for his partic
ular formal assurance I’m on the right road. I’m real as far as I go. I am not a sham—that the soul is not dead or sleeping for the soul is there—the being one with its noble walk, its wide vision knows that is something. I wanted to be assured. How pitiful I am!”

  James had a commanding presence, though he was sixty-two, portly, and half a foot shorter than she. The dinner party was tense with admiration. Cable amazed James with his detailed knowledge of characters he himself had forgotten, then slavishly threw himself on his knees while Ida giggled with embarrassment. James let them know he thought lecturing beneath his dignity, but Ida harkened to his speech, “The Lesson of Balzac,” as if it were an oracle. Struck by James’s use of the word “saturation” to describe Balzac’s absorption of life, she decided her challenge was “To comprehend all—to wade boldly into life and yet never let the thing—the experience—injure you. To keep always to the mastery of it that you may interpret life.”11

  James told her that he hoped she would be in Northampton for a few days, then stopped back for a last visit with her. They talked about French writers they knew in common such as the Daudets. Surely she told him she had met his brother William when he lectured at Chautauqua Lake. James told Cable privately, “Miss Tarbell has done a great work, that is it seems to me she has done a real work. She has a shining personality.” America had assailed him with an impression of graceless materialism. Here was the woman whose work had certified the greed he detected everywhere. When she told him that she was troubled by what she had written, that she hated the cruelty and brutality of telling the truth, especially in the profile of Rockefeller, he advised her, “Cheer up. If there’s anything you should cherish it’s your contempts. Cherish your contempt, young woman!”12