IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She was sanguine about woman’s finding her appropriate niche and her preface said so in a way that did not speak well for women like herself who chose careers: “The best that can be done for her is to see to it that this brief industrial period does not impair her physically or morally for her high functions, and above all that it does not lead her to believe even dimly that there are happier or more useful things than those to which she instinctively turns.”

  The American Magazine was also trying to depict the world in a favorable light in most of its articles, although it continued to muckrake for a time. Besides Tarbell’s tariff series and Baker’s study of the decline of religion in American life, there was “Barbarous Mexico,” which portrayed the conditions of peons in Mexico and the dubious role played by American business. But such articles were like the sudden rages of an otherwise sunny individual. “The American Magazine,” said Tarbell unapologetically, “had little muckraking spirit. It did have a large and fighting interest in fair play; it sought to present things as they were, not as somebody thought they should be.”34 The theater, the latest play, and the most interesting actresses were constant topics. Baseball stories appeared in season.

  The editors were practical. They might have taken “Money is the root of all evil” as the text of their discussions, for it tainted if not entirely corrupted them. In early 1911, as the tariff series concluded, Tarbell, Phillips, and their partners sold control to Crowell publishing. Gossips whispered that a trust had purchased muckraking’s most outstanding collection of journalists because a major Crowell stockholder was Thomas W. Lamont, partner of J. P. Morgan. A spokesman for The American said that they were simply following the current trend of many enterprises and allying themselves with a “larger unit” which would provide them with greater resources. Still, Crowell must have been responsible for the inclusion of one uncharacteristic article—an affectionate memoir of JDR complete with his charge that “Miss Tarbell’s exposé was just commercialism … Not one word about that misguided woman.”35 Rockefeller cautioned his sympathizers on the pages of Tarbell’s own magazine.

  Tarbell had been out of New York during most of the Crowell negotiations, but she worried about them. Pain in her arm, probably recurring neuralgia, drove her back to Clifton Springs. While there she reflected on the magazine’s policies and worried about Baker’s upcoming article on Progressive Republicans, which would criticize the popular Teddy Roosevelt. She wrote to Boyden: “Give Teddy another chance. It will be a long time before people believe in a man as good. Of course you know I don’t think he’ll come up to scratch but I hope he will.” She was concerned about the many critical issues that lay ahead and she warned Baker about Crowell’s take-over: “We shouldn’t amalgamate unless we are in control.” She was against turning over the magazine to anyone who would compromise their editorial integrity, but she wanted them to temper their positions so they would not offend readers.36

  After the merger with Crowell was concluded, she traveled to Stanford University in California to sit in on its six-week seminar on war and peace with such fellow students as Maxwell Anderson, a future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She arrived low in spirits and besieged by a case of influenza, and then stage fright compounded her illness. She was startled to learn she was expected to speak at a Los Angeles peace rally and without preparation was afraid to appear. “When I refused to get out of my bed they took it as proof of indifference to the cause. The truth was that the idea of speaking extemporaneously was at that time terrifying to me; ill too, I could not, or perhaps would not, rally my forces. I would rather be regarded as a sneak than attempt it.”37

  The change of scene did fire her with several ideas for the magazine. She held lengthy, lively interviews with Progressives in California and was eager to do their story; she also planned to collaborate with Stanford president David Starr Jordan on “The Case Against War,” thinking that they might take aim at Teddy Roosevelt after all. Under Crowell, none of these articles saw print. Characteristically, Roosevelt, who was also at Stanford, neither agreed nor completely disagreed with her tariff articles. She saw him in the middle of a group explaining that his job now was to keep the Eastern conservative and Western Progressive wings of the Republican party “flapping in unison.”

  To Baker she confessed to feeling more forceful in print than in Roosevelt’s presence. “I waffle terribly whenever I see him face to face. He seems so amazing, and yet he is less amazing personally than he was. The fact of the matter is that his emphasis is not so great in important matters. He has come to where he doubts and explains, and men, like women, are lost when they get there.”38

  Nonetheless, she knew he was a man to watch. In February 1912, Teddy Roosevelt announced he was prepared to lead insurgent Republicans, the so-called Progressives, against the renomination of his old friend President Taft. Thus Teddy lopped off the head of the Progressive movement, Senator Robert La Follette, and placed himself in the leadership position instead. La Follette had been the engine of the Progressive movement, but Teddy seemed to them like a rocket who could dramatically effect their goals. Progressives eagerly switched their support from the broken-hearted La Follette to Teddy. Some key points were lost in the transfer. La Follette and his followers had espoused the regulation of trusts and reform of the tariff. Teddy preferred constitutional reforms such as referendum and recall whereby elected officials and judges could be removed from office in midterm if citizens disapproved of the work. Tarbell smelled trouble and quickly organized a private luncheon where she and some political allies could test Roosevelt’s interest in reform. Among others, she invited William Allen White and Ray Stannard Baker, a loyal La Follette supporter. To Baker she explained her motives: “I think we may get a line on TR, at least we ought to be using every opportunity to get our minds clear as to what is to be done in the magazine. Do you realize that the shifting of the question to one of new government machinery [issues of referendum and recall] is going to do for the trust and tariff questions what the Panic of ’93 and the Spanish-American War did—turn attention from them? While we are fighting over the kind of vote with which to dislodge the enemy, the enemy will do as he did in ’93–4–5 and your ’97–98—build his entrenchments tougher.”39

  She wanted Baker to console La Follette. “Don’t let him think he’s ended. He is not. If he were only willing to fight and not be president! There’s going to be a sweep to him—believe me, to him,—La F—the fighter, not the presidential candidate.”

  Tarbell held her luncheon at The Colony Club, which fashionable women had modeled after the men’s clubs of Pall Mall in London. “The Colonel,” as TR titled himself, must have seen that the situation was a political San Juan Hill. Baker was a La Follette supporter, White was the senator’s friend, and Tarbell was always ready to bait the ex-president on the tariff. Saying only that he thought La Follette insincere, too radical, and incapable of leading Progressives, TR deftly played to his audience, placing himself where the light shone around him like a halo. He had aged only slightly; his mustache was turning white but his hair was the straw color of youth.

  Baker noted in his journal: “Again he impressed me with his wonderful social command of himself. He knows so well the right thing to say, to do: he was keenly sensitive to everyone in the party and during the two hours of the conversation he brought out something that was calculated to interest and please each of those present.”40 One doubts Tarbell was equally charmed.

  Other guests at the Roosevelt luncheon were Elizabeth Marbury and Anne Morgan, daughter of the great J.P. Morgan. After Boyden and Phillips, Morgan was probably Tarbell’s closest friend. Her earlier confidantes, Ada Vincent and Alice Hegan Rice, were both married, and now Tarbell was finding friends who, like herself, were single professional women.

  Corsets could not control the two hundred pounds of Elizabeth Marbury, nor polite society her speech. A year older than Tarbell and born to a wealthy New York family, she had met Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer i
n her well-traveled girlhood. She later invented the career of theatrical agent and thereby made her own fortune.

  In 1903, Marbury and her housemate Elsie de Wolfe purchased the Villa Trianon at Versailles, once Marie Antoinette’s favorite residence. One of their first visitors was Anne Morgan. They found her young for her thirty years; Marbury especially thought Morgan should train herself for an active role in the world. By 1912, Morgan had become a prominent advocate of trade unions and better working conditions for women, and de Wolfe, Marbury, and Morgan had become a triumvirate with private complexities no one can be sure of. As de Wolfe occupied herself more with decorating, Morgan and Marbury shared an interest in public affairs. Probably Tarbell found them to be the first women as engrossed as she in world events. From these two incessant smokers, Tarbell picked up her late-life habit of occasional and solitary puffing on cigarettes. Only at Marbury’s home did she smoke in public.

  Viola Roseboro, whose own language and demeanor were anything but genteel, disapproved of Marbury. “If she chewed tobacco she would be complete.… It seems IMT is amused to hear her swear and storm around like a Tammany Chief; she is certainly entertained with E.M.’s large varied contacts with people and movements of some significance.” But the acid test of Tarbell’s affection was an invitation to Redding Ridge. “She would pass out before she would have E.M. up to the farm …”41 Roseboro wrote with some asperity.

  Indeed, Marbury was never a guest at Redding Ridge, so Twin Oaks was never allowed to suffer by comparison with the Villa Trianon. Together, Tarbell, Morgan, and Marbury were professional women des affaires. When the British author and journalist Arnold Bennett met them at a luncheon hosted by Phillips, he was amazed by their independence and their intelligence. He made note in his journal: “These three women all extremely interesting, all different, yet intimate, calling each other by Christian names, coming together on a personal basis just like men.” He found Ida Tarbell “the most wistful and inviting of these three spinsters. A very nice kind face of a woman aged by hard work, by various sympathies, and by human experiences. A soft appealing face, and yet firm and wise. When asked to go down to Washington with Anne and Bessie, she said, ‘I’ve only just come back … and I haven’t been at my desk for four or five days.’ Just like a man. One imagined her desk.”42

  Bennett was condescending, but Tarbell probably would have agreed with his description. Now in her fifties, Tarbell felt her loneliness acutely and filled her time with several women’s clubs—The Colony, The Cosmopolitan, and The Pen and Brush. For all her involvement, Tarbell was not an avid clubwoman, claiming that women’s groups were more concerned with the machinery of organization than actual accomplishment. Yet these activities often absorbed her.

  She nicknamed The Colony her “swell club” and worked diligently to attract speakers of Progressive/Reformist stripe. Though she scorned the radical pronouncements of the social elite, she told William Allen White: “Over at my swell club, a couple of influential sisters have converted to radicalism … I think there is a real chance to do something here towards the conversion of The Four Hundred and their friends.”43 However she mocked or tried to justify her membership, Tarbell had been uncomfortable at The Colony Club since her very first meeting when a young woman tried to discuss the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis with her. Possibly as part of her study of women, Tarbell had read four volumes of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex which offered matter-of-fact discussions of masturbation, homosexuality, and sexual drives. Remarking that she had found Ellis’s theories hard to take, Tarbell stood up and walked away from her questioner, leaving the girl gazing after her in surprise.44

  Tarbell was initially indifferent to The Pen and Brush, a club composed of female artists and writers, which she had joined in the 1890s. However, in 1913 its president implored Tarbell to take over as president in order to solve an unspecified problem. The challenge appealed to Tarbell, whose pet theory was that if a problem was not discussed, analyzed, or argued, it solved itself. She agreed to accept for a twelve-month term, provided that no one ever tell her the difficulty she was to resolve. She served as president for thirty years—and never did learn what the initial crisis had been.

  After she became embroiled in her executive responsibilities at The Pen and Brush, she reassessed her activities. Her niece Clara, who became Ida’s social secretary after Esther married, recalled: “She had to protect herself against her warm-hearted instinct to do any and everything people asked her to do. Every so often a cleaning-out campaign would take place … One evening I saw her take a long list of clubs to which she belonged and cut it in two. [She said,] ‘This group is too wealthy for me.’ ‘This is entirely social and not for me.’ ‘I never use this one.’ And so on. The following morning a number of resignations were mailed out. Those which remained on her list were mostly groups of serious-minded women struggling for an ideal and for these she was willing to sacrifice time and energy.” At the same time Ida was willing to see Clara’s girlfriends who were ambitious to be writers. “Though I tried to protect her, she rarely refused an interview.”45

  Clara, who lived at a settlement house on Jones Street, was far more eager for experience than Esther had been. Clara’s daughter Caroline told the author that for a time Clara roomed with a girl named Bessie Brewer who had a brief (and undocumented) affair with Marcel Duchamp. Clara recalled parties given by Mabel Dodge that were attended by, among others, Dodge’s lover John Reed and Isadora Duncan who in Clara’s words “lay on the couch asking for seduction.”

  In her memoir, Clara wrote of her aunt during these days: “I wonder at Aunt Ida’s tolerance and patience with me for I was fertile ground for every idea—very young, very stupid, and very eager to ‘taste life.’ Yet she never criticized, dictated or even suggested … I learned more from her method of silent treatment than thousands of words could have taught me … I remember one day saying to her that I was going to join the Suffrage Party and march in the big parade being held in New York. She looked at me in a non-committal way and said, ‘Clara, what is the platform of the Suffrage Party?’” Clara could not answer. “What she did with that simple question was to make me realize how little I really knew about what I was marching for.”

  Tarbell apparently felt that few women understood the world’s realities. She thought of few women as her peers. Roseboro once observed, “I never saw IMT talk to any woman except most unconsciously de haut en bas. It is so natural, simple and gracious, it seems people do not get onto its subtleties, but it amused me much. Now this is a thing it would be cruel to bring before her by any suggestion for it would be such an odious revulsion of all she is conscious of in her social ideals.”46

  Tarbell’s correspondence shows that through the years she was helpful to women whenever she could be, especially to those who had proven their ability and seriousness. But the specter of a revolution in woman’s role unsettled her. After a quarter century of working in the world, she herself no longer needed to be defiant in order to remain independent. She had made her life, but her writings on women showed she did not like her handiwork. She tried to maneuver herself away from woman’s traditional place, but the new women she found around her wanted to change society. Tarbell thought that was a mistake.

  Tarbell was not the only successful professional woman who urged aspiring sisters to reconsider. Often female physicians advised women to be homemakers. One said that the outside world where “the mightiest forces of the universe and evolution are concerned” was not woman’s “noble sphere.” Another, Minerva Palmer of Rochester, warned in 1890 that whenever woman left home for education and opportunities, they were met “by disagreement from one of the best informed and most philanthropic class of citizens—the doctors.”47

  Even Elizabeth Marbury, writing her memoirs, cautioned as late as 1923: “If a woman through her own conceit registers against marriage in favor of some problematical career she will find, provided she lives long enough, that all through life she
is at best only a misfit. She may live creditably and even accomplish infinite good … nevertheless she has missed the normal expression of all these things clamoring within her for utterance.”48

  Motives for such statements were tangled. First, many were probably jealous of their status as the first or only woman ever to achieve a certain place. Second, women who had experienced the working world wanted to say that it was not wholly as glorious as homemakers supposed. Perhaps they feared that their sisters were not up to the rigors of the larger world or perhaps they were simply tired. Certainly Ida Tarbell was. As she approached the age of sixty, she found the past hollow and the future bleak. Hope waned. Her sense of urgency ebbed. She had seen thirty years of editorial battles and thought very little had been accomplished. She was beginning to grow old.

  Ten

  A Bad Woman

  Ida Tarbell, who had thought herself radical and bohemian in her college days, now found that she was one of the most conservative women speaking out. She had achieved economic independence, but she was still limited by expectations of what women were to be. Not having accepted woman’s destiny for herself, she approved it for others. Her ambition had spun her out into the world; her preconceptions hurled her back to “woman’s place”, and her mind wheeled round, pulled by two opposing forces.

  The Woman Question of the early twentieth century was composed of two parts. The first concerned woman’s nature—could she, should she, take a role in the world outside the home? The second question was more concrete—should women be allowed to vote?

  These issues were too emotionally-laden for Tarbell personally to allow her to assess them clearly. In articles later collected as The Business of Being a Woman, Tarbell passionately upheld the value and power of the homemaker. It seemed to her that woman, not man, was head of the household. Her rambling articles stopped just short of saying she had misspent her own life. Writing of young girls confused by the militancy of the 1870s, she was clearly referring to her young self. She observed that the central fact of a woman’s life was child bearing and rearing, but she lamented that a child, especially a young girl, was steered away from the facts of life as if they were something evil.