When she interviewed Joseph Wharton—iron magnate, steel master, nickel king, and benefactor of the Wharton School of Business—Wharton coolly confirmed that he controlled certain legislators and that tariffs were decided not so much by Congress as by those who would profit by them. “I wrote the bill of 1870,”21 he told her.
Before publication, Tarbell asked former president Grover Cleveland to review her manuscript. Cleveland had done the unprecedented twenty years before—he had sought to lower the tariff. This cost him so much support in his own Democratic party that he was defeated in 1888. Reelected president in 1892, he again strove—unsuccessfully—to lower the tariff.
Cleveland, living in happy retirement in Princeton, New Jersey, was delighted to help Tarbell. He exacted a price, however. When he saw that she had characterized his writing style as ponderous, he asked her to delete the offending adjective and she did.22
For two years her tariff articles dutifully recounted history. Then they caught fire with “Every Penny Counts” in which Tarbell reduced the intricacies of tariff codes to a single theme—the abuse of the average American—showing what the duty actually cost the consumer buying shoes, wool, and thread.23 She charged:
“The last man to be heard from at tariff hearings in this country is the man who buys the goods … at a time when wealth is rolling up as never before—(this country increased its wealth between 1900 and 1904 by about twenty billions of dollars)—a vast number of hard-working people in this country are really having a more difficult time making ends meet than they have ever had before …”
Tarbell noted that the price of shoes had increased by about twenty-five percent in ten years. By that day’s statistics, this meant that a family of four with forty dollars a year to spend for clothes spent eleven dollars and eighty-one cents on shoes. “This hardship comes largely from the tariff laid on hides in 1897 by the Dingley Bill. And why a tariff on hides? Simply to compel the American shoemaker to pay more for his leather.”
She asked in conclusion: “Is this fair? Are the ones to consider first in this matter of hides the Beef Trust, the Leather Trust—the Upper Leather Trust—the 85,000 cattlemen and the 300,000 or so workers in leather, or are the ones to consider first the toiling millions living on a wage where every penny counts?”
Though she resisted the title of reformer, insisting she was purely a journalist or actually a historian, Tarbell crusaded against the tariff with great indignation. When the Charities Publication Committee showed that Pittsburgh laborers commonly worked twelve hours a day seven days a week for a substandard wage, Tarbell lashed out at their employers whom she called “Pittsburgh millionaires who fill the glittering places of pleasure in the great cities of Europe and this country, who figure in divorce and murder trials, who are writing their names on foundations and bequests and institutions.” She called Pittsburgh a “tariff-made city” and made a point of the crime’s cost to its perpetrators as well as its victims: “Justice takes a terrible revenge on those who thrive by privilege. She blinds their eyes until they no longer see human misery. She dulls their hearts until they no longer beat with humanity. She benumbs their senses until they respond only to the narrow horizon of what they can individually possess, touch, feel.”24
Her censure was aptly timed. In 1909, from spring through summer, the House and Senate debated which raw materials would be taxed. It had some of the flavor of a casino, and the odds were that tariffs would be lowered. In April 1909, the House of Representatives passed the Payne Tariff Bill that removed the tax from coal, iron ore, hide, flax, and wood pulp, reduced other duties, and approved an inheritance tax. In the Senate, a bastion of privilege, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island was aghast. He drafted a bill that restored and increased much of what the Payne measure had taken away. By the time Congress passed the compromise Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act in August 1909, the public was outraged by the tariff and the tactics used. Much of the ire was directed at President William Howard Taft, President Roosevelt’s personally-anointed successor. He had promised the electorate that he would have the tariff revised and led people to expect that it would be lowered, not just readjusted. Taft never regained the popularity he had previously enjoyed.
Tarbell’s series addressed a key concern, but The American featured other public issues as well. Besides politics, it ran articles on the strange personality of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm. Baker was producing a series on race relations called “Following the Color Line.” He found that American justice did not extend to the black man and he pleaded for enlightened action.
In contrast, Tarbell was determined to be impartial on the Woman question. It was a time for women, for the genteel poor to go to the office, the wretched to go to the sweatshop, and the wealthy to go to the club. Since girlhood, Tarbell had puzzled over woman’s nature, much like the blind men of the parable who encountered an elephant for the first time. One held his trunk and said, “It’s a snake.” Another felt his leg and said, “It’s a tree.” Another fingered his ear and said, “This is a huge leaf.” Tarbell knew that she had never resolved her questions about the nature of woman or about how she could lead a fruitful life. Now that women were emerging into public life and the working world, The American wanted to devote a series to them and Tarbell obliged.
She interrupted her tariff series to do so. As was her style, she began with a historical perspective and featured such heroines as Abigail Adams, Catharine Beecher, and the astronomer Maria Mitchell. However, the seven “American Women” features were biographical listings lacking bite. Tarbell’s friend Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer thought Ida would do better to examine the present. “What are you bothering with such unmeaning stuff for?” she asked. Tarbell was fascinated by the women she had uncovered and she felt she must understand them in order to be able to comprehend the new “emancipated” woman, but in Van Rensselaer’s view, the past was much less interesting than the present. Tarbell was against suffrage, but totally for social reform.
The movement for social reform and settlement houses was active. Tarbell, partly through Van Rensselaer but largely through her journalistic contacts, became acquainted with such women as Lillian Wald, who had instituted public-health nursing; and Florence Kelley, founder of the National Consumers League.
The settlement movement was by now at full strength. It was largely a response to the growth of cities and of industry, and to the influx of immigrants. The idea was that concerned people would live or work among those in poor neighborhoods. It was a way to help the underprivileged, particularly the foreign-born, but there was a recognition that those who helped the poor were enriching their own lives. Jane Addams said in her autobiography that she started Hull House because she was desperate for a constructive outlet for her energy.
Tarbell spent some time in New York’s settlement houses to fill the hours once claimed by the endlessly social Sam McClure—but she sought to aid the disadvantaged chiefly through her pen. Even as she clung to the idea of traditional roles for middle class women, Tarbell spoke out vigorously on behalf of women who had to work in mills and factories. In a rare signed editorial titled “Man’s Inhumanity to Women,” she called on her sisters to urge the state of Illinois to preserve a ten-hour workday for women, rather than allow employers to work those who were bearing and raising children as long as they chose.25
In a letter published in the New York Times, Tarbell expressed sympathy for the Shirtwaist Workers Strike, a cause that inspired society women to join shopgirls in a fight for women’s rights. The strike, sometimes called “The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” began at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City after those trying to organize a union were fired. Tarbell’s encouraging letter to the organizers said: “What you are doing not only helps me and other women in the struggle for life as we know it today but it is going to help the cause for all women workers who are to come. I am glad you do not have to struggle single-handed and unaided, and I wish you a great success in this our common
cause.”26
The strike drew national support and was successful in that it led to the establishment of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control, which agreed on basic factory working conditions. However, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company refused to sign on. On March 25, 1911 a fire broke out there that trapped and killed 146 employees. The horror of the event galvanized support for the labor movement.
Ida Tarbell resumed work on the tariff after she concluded the historical sketches but contemporary women, especially poor ones, continued to be on her mind. She saw that the tariff issue had special relevance to them as managers of household budgets and she earnestly sought to demonstrate its personal effects. As she wrote to Viola Roseboro, “I am very unhappy about the tariff and I am trying to prepare the American woman for a raid on it!”27
Taking her crusade to the podium, Tarbell addressed the predominantly female League for Political Education. With passionate conviction, she told them that the consumer was paying double the fair price for cotton thread in order to support the thread trust, and that prices were rising without a corresponding increase in the wages of the poor. The American Economist, organ of the American Protective Tariff League, belittled her and her audience, yet clearly felt it needed to make a formal reply. The paper sneered that Tarbell’s hearers rode in automobiles and wore furs, yet worried over the cost of their stockings. Tarbell herself they dismissed as a woman with a “talent” for half-truths.”28
Undaunted, Tarbell pressed on. She examined the cost and shortage of quality goods, particularly warm, durable wool that until the 1870s had been generally affordable. She asked friends—probably Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley—to interview indigent New York housewives. Tarbell learned that wool in the tenements was as scarce as diamonds.
Tarbell went to New York’s tenement neighborhoods, the Lower East Side that housed the immigrant Jews, and the East Seventies where Slavs had settled. She found that some merchants were advertising “all wool” baby clothes at very low prices and she immediately detected fraud. She bought these “fine goods” and took them home to make closer examination. Remembering that wool was destroyed by boiling solutions of caustic alkali, she cut the items in half and submitted one part to bubbling solvent and the other half to boiling water. The clothes, she discovered, were cotton, not wool, and she told her readers so. Tarbell maintained that the high tariff in America made wool unaffordable and thus cheated the unsuspecting poor, forcing them to buy inferior goods at exorbitant prices.
After explaining all this in the November 1910 American, Tarbell called for a pure textile law similar to the pure food law. She said, “Personally, I am of the opinion that here is a valuable work for the women’s clubs of the country. Women are necessarily more concerned in this matter than anybody else. They are the buyers. They should know.” Then she showed some condescension, probably without meaning to. She added: “The study and analysis of cloth is not difficult and it is entertaining. It is admirably adapted to club work.”
Having seen Ida Tarbell attack the Standard Oil Company with some success, the president of the American Woolen Company thought it wise to respond. He announced that the wool tariff had yielded sixty million dollars in government revenue and he said that he didn’t believe it cost the people a cent more for clothing. Newspapers across the nation carried his statement and scoffed. The Boston Post asked who paid the tariff if the public did not: “Not foreign exporters, not wholesalers who passed the cost to retailers, and not retailers …” Wool clothes, the Post reminded readers, cost consumers much more than they had ten years before.
Not all response echoed Tarbell’s view, of course. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph insisted that tariff protection made the country prosperous and allowed it to build up productive mills, but the newspaper did allow that cotton and wool schedules had been framed for the benefit of “certain interests.” In December 1910, Tarbell named, for the first time, the champion of these “interests.”
A truly gripping drama needs a villain, but the tariff had too long a history to be the work of one man. She solved her technical problem when she discovered that Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, the Rhode Island Republican, was the architect of thirty years of tariffs. Ironically, his daughter Abby had married John D. Rockefeller’s son and together they were raising a brood that would include the governors of New York and Arkansas, a chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, major financiers, philanthropists, and art patrons.
Tarbell said of the senator: “I think it is entirely fair to Mr. Aldrich to say that from his first connection with Congress he saw that the tariff properly worked was the surest road to power and to wealth that this country offered to a politician.”29 She found him blameworthy enough to merit two separate articles—one on his career and the other on egregious industrial conditions in his native Rhode Island.
Soon after the Payne-Aldrich Bill was signed into law in August 1909, Tarbell traveled to Aldrich’s state where the number of infant graves, marked by numbers rather than names, exceeded four thousand. In outraged sympathy for the women who lived there she wrote: “After her ten hours at spindle or loom the woman hurries to a cold, unkempt house, which she must make comfortable and cheerful if it is to be so. Is it strange that the homes of the factory mothers are generally untidy, the food poor, the children neglected? How can it be otherwise? Her limit of endurance, of ambition, of joy, even of desire in life, has been passed. More appalling, she sees her ability to work falling off … the surprise is not that many drink but that more do not.”30
In Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket she stood in workplaces sweltering at ninety degrees, breathed air that was soupy with lint, stood in the picker rooms where “machinery bellowed like a thousand angry bulls,” next to “shrieking spinning machines and the banging looms” that continuously shook her body.
She observed the lack of sanitary conditions—lint-topped buckets of water which were supposed to quench parched throats; dry, fetid closets for toilets; and men and women forced to change and wash side by side at the end of a ten-hour day. She found wages for a fifty-eight-hour week varied from $7.80 to $15.35, but even “top” pay was not enough to offset the tragic results of such squalid conditions. Health records showed that epidemics of bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and industrial accidents due to fatigue rendered workers unfit by age fifty-five. Homelife hardly existed. Children, often eight to a family, were placed in the care of nurseries and schools until age fourteen, when they themselves were old enough to go to work.
Unable to believe her own eyes, Tarbell verified conditions by reviewing social workers’ reports. The resulting article took direct aim at protectionists who claimed the tariff benefited the American workers. The American sprinkled the piece with photographs of the mansions of mill owners and Senator Aldrich himself, who grew acres of apples, pears, and melons under glass in wintertime.
Tarbell wrote passionately of collusion between big business and politics, the exploitation of the worker and the consumer: “This, then, is high protection’s most perfect work—a state of a half million people turning out an annual product worth $187,000,000, the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable and bent with disease, the average employers rich, self-satisfied and as indifferent to social obligations as so many robber barons.”31
This indictment marked the conclusion of her tariff series. As it reached magazine racks in January 1911, Tarbell asked Addams, who was visiting New York, and Lillian Wald to lunch with her at The Colony. One of her letters of invitation showed that she thought her efforts inferior to those who actually worked among the poor: “I feel a good deal of the time like an antiquated blunderblus [sic] firing at a modern fort but I suppose even a blunderblus might accidentally pick off something. You who work with living material and the young particularly are the real formers and re-formers of men and you dear Lillian Wald stand among the few at the top in my experience.”32
In her own crusading on the tariff, Tarbell had galvanized newspa
per editors around the country, exposed an important senator to public scorn, and aroused the American consumer to the injustices of big business practices, but she did not see the impact she had had. This is especially sad because the tariff investigation throbbed with human feeling. She had pierced the nexus of trust and tariff, vested interests and the states’ representatives, and revealed human misery and those who profiteered from it. Whatever the tariff’s value to the country, she had found the cost.
Synthesizing rates and schedules and following the string of pay-offs as it stitched the legislative process had exhausted her and left her aching for rest. She had functioned as a single-minded writing machine, and now she wanted only to drop the topic of the tariff.
She thought its lobby too strong to fight. Industrialists insisted they had to have foreign markets, but they still wanted protection from competition. Organized labor, seeking to protect American jobs, backed them. “I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider like me to do but [wait for] revolution,”33 she said years later.
Revolution was of course the last thing Tarbell would actually have wanted. One of her hopes was that abuses could be discovered and corrected before a violent protest: “… the only chance of peace and of permanency in this country lies in securing for the laboring classes an increasing share of increasing wealth,” she warned in The American of March 1909.
Seeing the destitution of the mill towns, remembering the hellish steel plants she had seen with Dot Walker outside Poland, Ohio, Tarbell was unable to believe that such a situation could continue. She was convinced that agriculture and natural resources, not manufacturing, were the true bases of America’s economy. Confident that manufacturing would be relegated to countries where labor was cheap, she did not concern herself in the dilemma of how women should fit into the industrial world. She wrote in a 1911 preface to a collection called The Book of Woman’s Power: “The industrial woman as we see her today will pass as this country regains the industrial balance it has lost, as the present unhealthy and abnormal attention given to manufacturing ceases, and commerce and agriculture are restored to their proper place.”
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