IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She recorded all this in her journal: “Awful for me. Could not talk. He referred to his love for me—said I all while had loved him in l’affaire Wilkinson. Feel he is not wholly sincere yet he thinks he is—am not cured yet. I ache dreadfully.” McClure sobbed that he had always loved her, flung his arms around her, kissed her, and left her crying. She wrote: “I sat down sobbing hysterically but am more convinced than ever that we are right.”

  In the middle of this chaotic period, the spring of 1906, two things happened. First, Ida Tarbell bought a house in the country, largely from her book royalties. It was as if she wanted to dispose of her money while she still knew where it was coming from.

  One morning during the fracas, she announced she was off to Redding Ridge, Connecticut, to buy land she had optioned on a whim. Boyden banged his fist on the desk, declared her unfit to be trusted, and insisted on going along to protect her. Later, charmed by the matched oak trees in front of the farmhouse and the gurgling brook in the rear, he allowed her to proceed with her purchase of the property and thereafter was solicitous over its changes and improvements.

  Ida bought the place thinking it would be a refuge of solitude on the weekends, but in the beginning it was like a wonderful toy to share with friends and family. Esther accompanied her to Macy’s Department Store where they bought provisions with gusto. They purchased staples by the pound, including a supply of pepper so large that it survived the long-lived Tarbell.

  The other noteworthy event that occurred that spring was that Theodore Roosevelt denounced crusading journalists as “muckrakers,” a development which caused a sensation everywhere but at McClure’s, which was busy with pyrotechnics of its own.

  It had been two years since the president and others read Sam McClure’s editorial on “The American Contempt for Law.” In the meantime, nearly every publication had zealously investigated something—often to good effect as in Samuel Hopkins Adams’s revelation of poisonous patent medicines, which appeared in Collier’s.

  Readers, at least those who had not been numbed by all these disclosures, had begun to feel they were being cheated or poisoned by someone somewhere every day. As Mr. Dooley noted in the December 16, 1905, Collier’s, things weren’t like the old days: “If anything, ivrybody was too good to ivrybody else … but now whin I pick up me fav’rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong …” Mr. Dooley especially singled our “Idarem on Jawn D” and in so doing provided Miss Tarbell with a nickname. Henceforth, the staff gaily called her Idarem.

  But in Washington, President Teddy Roosevelt was not so jaunty. Well-born, however he might like to dress up and play the cowboy, he feared what the common man was capable of doing, especially since his predecessor William McKinley had been assassinated by an anarchist. The president implored Sam McClure to have Steffens “put more sky in his landscapes,” and thus have the dirt in perspective: “It is unfortunate,” Roosevelt wrote the editor, “to encourage people to believe all crimes are connected with business and that the crime of graft is the only crime.”25 He thought they should show the hideous iniquities—such as the slaughter of the French Revolution—of which mobs could be guilty.

  Roosevelt’s disapproval continued to build until Hearst’s Cosmopolitan published the well-documented “The Treason of the Senate” in March 1906. The president was irate over the attack on Senator Chauncey Depew, whom he called “poor old Chauncey.” Others termed him “the railroad Senator” because he had been president of the New York Central and served its interests in his public post. Still, at a meeting of the Gridiron Club in Washington, D.C., shortly thereafter, Roosevelt lashed out. The club was an organization of reporters and sought to encourage candor and bonhomie between public officials and the press. In his speech, which by tradition was off the record, Roosevelt likened the authors of exposure to the man with the muckrake in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who fixed his eyes on cleaning mire when he might have seen a celestial crown: “There are beautiful things above and around them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone. If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows,”26 Teddy declared.

  Word of the attack spread rapidly through the publishing and political worlds, and TR, always one to capitalize on a trenchant catchphrase, decided to repeat the speech. This time he spoke for the record at the laying of the cornerstone for the new office building planned for the House of Representatives. Privately, Roosevelt wrote to Ray Stannard Baker and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that he was talking only of the scandalmongering newspapers of William Randolph Hearst.27 But he made no such distinction when he spoke on April 14, 1906, however. In the public mind, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida M. Tarbell stood condemned by the popular Teddy.

  Weary of three and a half years of exposés, the press backed Roosevelt. Ellery Sedgwick, former McClure’s staffer and now editor of the Atlantic Monthly, warned: “Men are tried and found guilty in magazine counting rooms before investigation is begun.” Collier’s opined that true investigators were finding their authority diminished: “Why listen to facts when diatribes are at hand?”28

  Tarbell was so preoccupied by other matters that she seemed not to have grasped the importance of the ruckus. As she thought about it in later years, she could never decide if in fact she had been a muckraker, journalist, or a historian. Just as in her college days when she avoided being a “Delta girl,” or a “Gamma girl,” by taking the pin of every boy who offered her one, she refused to accept any label.

  The press, which by now was aware of the situation at McClure’s, attributed the company’s trouble to Roosevelt’s speech. The Chicago Journal said it had prompted Sam McClure to set his staff of muckrakers adrift; the Sentinel of Milwaukee claimed that Steffens and his like had only been interested in money and would now abandon muckraking. McClure and Phillips both denied any disagreement over the magazine’s policy, but Phillips confirmed publicly that some of the staff might be leaving.

  When reporters asked Tarbell if the battle were over editorial policies, she was noncommittal. Unable to learn the issues involved and feeling that Tarbell and her colleagues were ganging up on one man, the press sided with McClure.

  Sensing an opportunity for profit, J. Walter Thompson, founder of the advertising agency, and Senator John Dryden, a founder of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, offered to buy into the magazine. McClure, who probably realized that such associates would compromise him, declined.

  At one point, McClure sought to buy out Phillips, but, unable to face a truncated staff, decided instead to sell to him. Then he begged Phillips and Tarbell to take him back and they agreed—if he gave them total control. Tarbell was ready. She instantly drafted a memo allotting 360 shares of the Samuel S. McClure Company in trust to Phillips, Steffens, Baker, and herself with the option of purchasing within 5 years 300 more shares at $2000 per person. This group was also to receive a total of 200 shares of the book publishing arm. But McClure never signed the agreement.

  Tarbell’s quick and canny action, meticulously calculated down to the decimal point, had stunned McClure. He realized that while he had thought they were working out their differences, Ida was telling his brother and longtime associates that separation was the only possible course. She had called a meeting at her apartment of Siddall, Phillips, and the rest to decide whether to try to buy or sell. In contrast to Phillips, who was so nervous that his leg shook violently every time he sat down, Tarbell was tranquil in her resolve. As soon as Phillips left New York to visit his family, McClure saw a chance to appeal to him. He dictated a five-page letter for Phillips to discuss with his parents who had known Sam McClure for a quarter of a century. By inference, he did not want Ida Tarbell to be immediately privy to it: “My dear John, I am sure that you and I, if we had confined this discussion to ourselves personally, calling in three or four of our best friends f
rom the outside like Mather and Charlie Taylor, this matter would never have reached this pass …”29 He declared it was nonsense to think that more than one man was needed to manage the magazine.

  Writing with more respect and affection than he had shown Phillips in years, McClure implored him to go to Europe to rest for a year as McClure had done and then to return to his post. “I judge from your hesitancy you are entirely at sea as to what to do,” wrote McClure. Without mentioning Tarbell specifically, he urged: “If from now on in these discussions we limit ourselves to discussing the matter with our two lawyers and with two people like Robert McClure and Oscar Brady, who are comparatively calm, and not take in the entire office, which is overwrought and hysterical, we shall come to a better and safer decision.”

  But that was not to be. On a snowy late March day, another agreement was drawn up whereby Phillips and Tarbell were to receive unspecified cash or stock as severance, and reduced weekly salaries—two hundred fifty dollars for Phillips and two hundred dollars for Tarbell—as they wound up their duties, which included completion of several more Lincoln articles. A week later, seeing that the settlement would take an indefinite time, Tarbell tendered her resignation “to be free to go on with any work I may decide upon.”30

  McClure broke down under this blow and took himself to Clifton Springs Sanitarium—Ida’s sanctuary. From there he wrote that in view of her “extraordinary” service, he would pass a resolution through the board of directors giving her three months’ vacation at full salary of three hundred dollars. He added that she would sail to Europe about May 1, spend a month in Florence, and join the McClures in Milan for six weeks. “So you will have had that three month’s vacation and one month’s work and we will all be so happy, well and strong. God bless us all!”31

  She was seriously alarmed. “Board of directors” was a new phrase in the McClure vocabulary and the rest was jibberish. She feared that he was so confused that he would not buy them out after all. In a tizzy she telephoned him and was so vituperative that he wrote her afterward that he was doing all he could to meet her wishes, but that he had divested himself of sole authority and was relying on others to see that he did nothing foolish.

  The financial state of McClure’s was so complicated and the principals so emotional that matters were not settled for a year. Boyden, Steffens, Baker, Siddall, Dunne, David McKinlay of the book company, and McClure’s cousin Harry joined Tarbell and Phillips in their walkout. As for her diary, Ida Tarbell never felt the need to write in it again.

  Nine

  A Second Crusade

  Ida Tarbell allowed herself no time to feel the aftershocks of the split from McClure. She went on the road to enlist backers in a new venture—The American Magazine. Started as Leslie’s Weekly over thirty years before, it had skirted muckraking but regularly discussed public affairs as well as offering fiction and humor. It was now up for sale and the McClure’s rebels decided to set up their own publication with Phillips as the deserving head.

  In order to buy the magazine, they needed $460,000 of which $160,000 was required in a few months. Tarbell and Phillips expected to realize $100,000 from McClure in the early fall, but as Phillips noted, “One dollar of SS’s in the hand is worth a million of SS’s in the bush.”1 And $400,000 in 1906 is the equivalent of $4 million in the 1980s.

  Tarbell was galvanized by a combination of bravado about the future, defiance of McClure, and a sense of esprit de corps. It was a new beginning. Together she, Phillips, Steffens, Baker, Boyden, and Siddall were plunging themselves in debt and pledging past success as security for the future. At McClure’s she had earned eight thousand dollars a year. The American would pay five thousand. “Miss Tarbell,” Baker recalled, “was one of the most dauntless of the adventurers.”2

  To raise capital, Tarbell canvassed right-thinking moneyed friends. Between May and the end of June she went to independent oil men in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, to Thomas B. Wanamaker, son of the retailer and owner of the North American newspaper, and some of her brother’s contacts in the oil business.

  In Boston, her prospects were manufacturers E. N. Foss and W. L. Douglas, known foes of the protective tariff: she was preparing an exposé of that very subject and felt that they would be most supportive of her efforts. “Just put it up to him that she is going to write in our new magazine on the tariff. They have got to help,”3 Siddall wrote Baker who was off to solicit funds from an exponent of free trade.

  Steffens also approached potential backers including “reform” mayors Tom Johnson of Cleveland and D. Percy Jones of Minneapolis, and other heroes of his “shame” series such as Governor Lucius Garvin of Rhode Island and Everett Colby of the New Jersey state senate. New Jersey judge James B. Dill, an expert on business law, Progressive retailer Edward Filene and stockbroker Robert Goodbody were also on his list.

  Tarbell, Steffens, and their friends touted their magazine as an out-and-out organ for reform. A dozen or so of their hoped-for backers responded favorably and William Allen White later described the investors as men “whose eyes saw the coming of the Lord.” With hindsight, he called The American “an organ of propaganda wrapped in the tinfoil of a literary quality which at least reflected the temper of the times.”4

  From James Corrigan, featured in her earlier character sketch as Rockefeller’s ill-treated boyhood friend, Tarbell raised five thousand dollars in cash. Plumbing industrialist Charles R. Crane contributed, as did Walter R. Stubbs, a future governor of Kansas, and William Kent, a Chicago millionaire and California congressman. These are cited in papers pertaining to The American. The names of the rest have not survived.

  Except for Stubbs, the contributors were acquaintances of Ida Tarbell. Ida’s niece Esther recalled in particular the time Ida invited Crane to tea. He discovered, to Ida’s embarrassment, a crack in her teapot and the next day sent a magnificent replacement. Esther was practical about this development: “I advised enlarging the hole in the Oriental rug before his next visit and Aunt Ida tried to look scandalized.”5

  Although she was a driving force, Tarbell was not one of the officers of the Phillips Publishing Company that was formed in late June 1906. Phillips was president; Steffens, vice-president; Boyden, secretary; and David McKinlay, treasurer. She was, however, first to sign the letter soliciting subscriptions. Her signature was bolder and bigger than she had ever used on any letter before and about twice as high as those of her colleagues.

  The press paid the journalists little attention, being at that time occupied by the sensational murder of architect and man-about-town Stanford White, but Phillips and friends proclaimed The American to be a magazine of writers by writers. The announcement trumpeted: “We shall not only make this new American Magazine interesting and important in a public way, but we shall make it the most stirring and delightful monthly book of fiction, humor, sentiment, and joyous reading that is anywhere published.”

  It intended to carry the best literature, to offer the most intelligent forum for ideas, and to be positive in outlook. In other words, it was to be McClure’s, only kinder. The announcement was accompanied by Sunday-best photographs of the staff. Tarbell was shown in a light-colored gown, a bow at her waist, open book in her hand, looking with calm confidence into the camera.

  That The American felt itself on a holy mission was exemplified by the diligence of the usually erratic Finley Peter Dunne. He took a desk in their cramped offices at 141 Fifth Avenue and appeared with what Tarbell considered to be, for him, amazing regularity.

  Always in the air was the vendetta against their old chief. Tarbell and Phillips were especially rancorous as they waited for the settlements. Baker alone struggled with guilt. He had learned that he had cost McClure fifteen thousand in the one libel suit sustained against their muckraking.

  Fund-raising, articles still due to McClure, and perennial travels occupied Tarbell and her colleagues so that they did not have much time to work on their inaugural issue of October 1906, nor on the following one.
Boyden sent Baker a pleading letter in late July asking him to contribute something. All they had to rely on, he said, was Steffens, “and he is not the surest proposition in the world as you know. JSP is in Duxbury ‘knocked out’ but due in tomorrow. Miss Tarbell is of course in the country. So Siddall and I, left to ourselves, are getting kind of nervous over this November number.”6

  They constantly had to encourage or revive each other. When Tarbell went to Washington in August to read every Congressional Record since 1888 for her tariff research, Boyden dispatched an affectionate note that prompted Ida to respond that she was not the entirely self-reliant person he thought her to be. She commented that Phillips, who had come down to help her get a perspective on the tariff, “looked ill,” but she assured Boyden that they should not fret unduly over their pioneer days: “It is to the future of the magazine we must look. We are laying the foundation for a great magazine respected for its freshness and reasoned opinion.”7

  Tarbell had reason for optimism, for believing that the tide of opinion was sweeping toward the direction of the high-mindedness The American intended to rally. On July 22, Attorney General W. H. Moody announced that suits would be brought against the Standard Oil Company for accepting rebates. A few weeks later, Standard Oil was indicted in Chicago for the same offense. In late September, strikes by Standard workers in Whiting, Indiana, erupted in riots; and on November 15, 1906, the U.S. Government began its suit in St. Louis to dismantle the Standard Oil monopoly.

  As events unfolded, Tarbell repaired to Redding Ridge to study the tariff. She had originally intended to preside over her aging farmhouse and forty acres with benign neglect while she wrote and gathered wildflowers; but rainwater dripped through the roof onto her papers, buttercups were obscured by growing grass, and underbrush and weeds defied her sense of order. The brambles of homeowning began to catch the hem of her gown. She decided that only extra income from royalties would go into the place. Of this, a third would be for the house, a third for the land, and a third for furnishings. Soon money she had set aside for a new evening dress had to be used to purchase fertilizer. She began to take on more free-lance work, often writing superficial essays to make “extra income” for the farm. Ida felt she had a home at last and she named it Twin Oaks like the Hubbard mansion. Allowing the soil to be unproductive began to bother her. She had the field plowed, corn planted, and an orchard put in. She acquired a cow, a pig, chickens, and a workhorse she named “Minerva,” after her own middle name.