IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  Tarbell went so far as to blame poor sex education for three social ills: woman’s revolt against marriage, her difficulty in choosing a proper mate, and her lack of respect for homemaking. Unhappiness oozed from her pen, outlining the shadow of her mother, Esther Tarbell. Esther had always had the ability to unsettle her daughter and Ida had a constellation of worries concerning her mother’s health or disposition, Sarah’s sacrifice, or Ida’s own inadequacies. One of Esther’s visits to New York left Ida so agitated that Lillian Wald was seriously alarmed. Despite Tarbell’s lifelong circumlocutions, her articles make it obvious that she resented her mother for instilling in her a negative feeling toward marriage. Probably she also resented Esther’s implicit criticism of Franklin Tarbell.

  In her article “Making a Man of Herself,” Tarbell conceded that the dissatisfied woman had some just complaints—she should be allowed to feel she was paying her own way, and she should develop outside interests so as not to feel useless when her children were grown. Tarbell further opined that woman lacked the vision necessary to achieve greatness; thus young girls must be made to understand “the essential barrenness of the achieving woman’s triumph, its lack of the savor and tang of life, the multitude of makeshifts she must practice to recompense her for the lack of the great adventure of natural living.”1

  That was enough to rouse feminists. On April 15, 1912, suffragists called a rally at the Metropolitan Temple in New York, specifically to respond to Tarbell’s papers. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, the feminist writer, told the assembly they were making the unusual effort because of “the ability and dignity and power of the woman who writes them and not because of the ability, dignity or power of the papers themselves.”

  Methodist preacher Anna Howard Shaw ridiculed Tarbell for saying that women could have defeated the Beef Trust by patronizing independent butchers. Shaw ventured to say, “I wonder where the railways, the packers and the alien landlords and the government-protected cattle come in.”2

  Tarbell was taken to task in private by women she respected. Florence Kelley, whom Tarbell admired as an “old war horse—straight out and out,” accused her of betraying the cause of women. After this encounter, Tarbell reiterated her convictions and her doubts in a letter to Kelley: “We seem to me in our effort to enlarge our lives and to serve society better to look too much to the way men try to do these things. That’s what I mean by my ugly and unsatisfactory phrase ‘Making a Man of Herself.’ I have done it myself and I have watched hundreds of other women do it. Somewhere in there something is wrong, my dear Mrs. Kelley. I don’t know that I am going to be able to get it out. I am afraid not … I don’t believe you know how hard it is really for me to feel that I am not altogether with you and Jane Addams and a lot of other women, every one of them worth vastly more to society than I am.”3

  Soon afterward, Addams and Lillian Wald, co-founder with Kelley of the National Child Labor Committee, asked Tarbell to lunch. Knowing they wanted to take her to task, Ida parried every conversational opening, passing the salt whenever the talk turned serious. The meal was amiable and inconclusive. “I was a regular devil. I wouldn’t let them come to a head and they didn’t bring it to an issue,” Tarbell recalled. But she was hurt by Addams’s remark, which was thoughtlessly conveyed by a mutual friend: “There is some limitation to Ida Tarbell’s mind.”4

  Indeed, the most active women of her time all ridiculed Tarbell, if not to her face, then behind her back. Helen Keller, whose mastery over multiple handicaps astonished the world, was a militant suffragist, though her revered teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, was not. Learning that the great Ida Tarbell was an “anti,” Keller, impatient at age thirty, exclaimed that Tarbell was growing too old to understand the changing world. Her words, passed along, stung Tarbell sharply.

  Many of Tarbell’s closest friends had applauded her defense of the home. Ray Stannard Baker, who went to hear Tarbell give the annual Phi Beta Kappa address at Mount Holyoke College, wrote about her in his diary: “She covered herself with glory: and the essence of her message was quite contrary to the modern propaganda of the advanced woman. She said the present restiveness was the result of self-consciousness [selfishness] and that the true new woman would turn to the development of the duties of her sex rather than to attempt to invade the activities of men. She thought, so I gathered, that the duty of woman to the state was as sort of state housekeeper or home-keeper—a larger vision of domestic management.”5

  Tarbell intended to rouse women to do their duty. It was a cold-shower world she urged them to and she did not confine her whistle blasts to The American. For Woman’s Home Companion she wrote an article in May 1915 called “Twenty Cent Dinners.” Using the example of a Chicago girl who attempted to kill herself because she said she could no longer bear a world where she had only cheap food, Tarbell replied that spirited people were often willing to go without food and to make the most of the little they had.

  Intending to hearten her readers, Tarbell said of the near-suicide: “The wrong society did her was not in giving her so little money but in depriving her of the moral and mental training necessary to use effectively what she had. Somehow, out of the medley of unrelated ideas which had found their way into her brain to be brooded over in hours of fatigue and disappointment, she had developed overwhelming self-pity, a detestation of a life which was meager and struggling.”

  Most readers were shocked by her callousness, but Tarbell did not defend herself until the 1930s when she insisted she had been right and predicted that even in the Great Depression, some people would have extraordinary success because they dared to take risks and sacrifice cheerfully.

  Of the stacks of mail she received, one letter so impressed Tarbell that she had it typed for her confidential files. A woman named Juliet V. Straner, an anonymous contributor to Ladies’ Home Journal, wrote Tarbell that her husband had gambled away her money and that she had raised her two daughters only with the help of her mother. Each girl married a man who failed in business and one daughter died under her burdens, leaving Straner with her little boy. The woman lamented that they had worked hard and had nothing while those who did little were prosperous: “Oh, honey,” she told Tarbell, “when you write about home—well, of course, it’s all true and we’ve got to keep on saying it—but if you ever fancy you’ve missed a whole lot missing motherhood—just don’t think so anymore. With the knowledge I have of life no power could tempt me to bring a child into the world or undertake to raise it.”6

  Although she might have seemed to be a successful spinster lecturing to other women on the merits of sacrifice, Tarbell was in fact meeting heavy obligations to her own family. In her sermonlike articles, Tarbell asked no more of her readers than she was willing to do herself. She was the most successful Tarbell and thus she felt obliged to help the rest. Will’s son Scott, a graduate of Haverford and Princeton, was trying his luck in Kentucky oil fields and hitting dry wells. His father had already invested in his ventures, so increasingly, Scott turned to his Aunt Ida for small loans to bail him out.7

  Will had left the Pure Oil Company, traded in various oil stocks, and even at one point tried to buy the Drake Hotel in Titusville. By 1913, a concerned Ida tried to discover the state of the family finances, but Will wrote her that he wouldn’t dream of harassing her with details of the debts: “You’re not so used to them as I am.” He assured her that their mother and Sarah would have enough to get along on. “I’m sorry I’m not in as good a position as they are. My worry is for Ella [Will’s wife] and myself but when I run out of insurance premium funds probably Providence will drop me dead and that will fix Ella.”8

  Will lacked financial acumen, but his expertise in the oil business was unquestioned. One burgeoning Oklahoma oil company sent him to Brazil and Argentina to scout Latin properties that were being bought up by Europeans.

  Meanwhile, despite the antagonism she aroused, Tarbell fearlessly continued to comment on women in widely differing situations. She stated that economic st
atus, dictated by luck, marriage, or birth, determined where a woman fit in society, and she accused the privileged of not living up to their obligations, especially their responsibility to poor girls who turned to prostitution to support themselves. For instance, Tarbell maintained that domestic service was preferable to the factory as a career for the poor.

  In many articles she stressed that affluent women should make the effort to train domestic help properly and so keep young girls from taking up unsavory professions as their livelihood. Her own innocence and trust backfired on her in the matter of her own maids, however. The first one had to be fired after several years’ employment for drinking and disturbing others in the building. The next was let go at the superintendent’s request; she had made Tarbell’s kitchen a “place of assignation.” Another, a girl from Redding Ridge, roused Tarbell from bed with piercing shrieks that she was dying. Tarbell applied the usual remedies for cramps until she realized the girl had been giving herself an abortion. At one in the morning ambulance orderlies removed the girl from Tarbell’s home. Shortly thereafter, Tarbell moved from West Ninth Street to 120 East Nineteenth on Gramercy Park—quarters too small for nieces, nephews, siblings, or live-in maids. When she wished to entertain, she simply took guests to the nearby National Arts Club.9

  To write from personal experience, one needs experience and insight, yet Tarbell tried hard to uphold a tradition she herself had carefully avoided. Not surprisingly, the result was confused. Editorializing was not her forte. Finley Peter Dunne rarely accepted her contributions to “The Interpreter’s House,” a monthly column of editors’ observations. “You sputter like a woman,”10 he told her.

  Despite her oft-repeated convictions on woman’s place, when it came to the question of suffrage, Tarbell insisted she sat on the fence. “While I am not willing to work for the ballot, I am not willing to work against it,” she would write to Jane Addams. But in fact she had been a member of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Woman since 1903, joined its executive board in 1908, and in 1911 was named an executive of the national group, although the title was largely honorary.

  Tarbell tried to enjoy the exercise of debate. She wrote Jane Addams after her stay at Hull House in 1908: “I think we’re going to have a lively woman’s winter. Society in New York has determined to intellectualize itself! Of course the women must do it. The first efforts may be amusing but it’s a good thing and something will come of it. I believe woman’s suffrage is going to get a substantial lift from efforts that are now under way. Mrs. Mackay is planning like a statesman for a campaign of education and though I’m so lukewarm on suffrage, I am rejoicing over the effort.”11

  She secretly thought that the socialites campaigning for the vote were absurd and scoffed: “Catherine Mackay and Mrs. O. P. Belmont wanted everything and suffrage was something they didn’t have.”12

  She insisted that before she could take a position she had to understand the fundamental problem. She herself asked what effect the woman’s vote would have on society. Suffragists said women with the franchise could cure all ills. Tarbell didn’t believe that, so she argued against the vote. It was the proverbial problem of not seeing the forest because she was studying spruce and pine trees. Like other “antis,” she philosophized on the abstract notion of woman’s nature while avoiding the basic question—were women citizens? Did not all citizens have the right to vote? Ray Stannard Baker cut through obfuscations when he wrote in the June 1912 American: “Are women people? In a few places Negroes are people in a political sense, but in the South there are 9,000,000 of them [women] who are not people. In a few places women are people, to be trusted with democratic instrumentalities, but in most places they are not. If we could really agree on who are the people, we should have all our troubles settled in a twinkling!”13

  John Phillips could not understand Tarbell. He told her she seemed illiberal and contradictory and suggested she was too proud to say she’d been wrong to go with the anti-suffragists. At one point, he invited her to explain her position. She said she couldn’t do it in a conversation, so in response she wrote him a fourteen-page, triple-spaced sometimes-defensive reply: “You seem to be coming to the conclusion that what Hellen Keller is reported to have said of me not long ago is true—that is, that I am getting too old to understand and sympathize with the aspirations of a growing world! It is quite probable that there is at least a suspicion of truth in all you say. I have always found it difficult to explain myself, even to myself, and I do not often try.” Here she noted on her own copy in pencil: “And I feared partisanship—inferiority.” She seemed to be afraid she would find herself somehow lacking if she looked too deeply within. Her ambivalence was clear throughout the letter. She said she doubted that women would use their ballot any more wisely than men had or that it would educate her any more than it had him. But she hinted that women might be superior after all: “I confess I’ve always pitied men a little that they could not know the death struggle for a new life and I always had a feeling of superiority over them …” She quoted George Bernard Shaw’s scrubwoman: “If three-quarters of you was killed we could replace you with the help of the other quarter.…” Thus wrote Tarbell, mother of none, to Phillips, father of five.

  “Women may discover women in this operation,” she continued. “It is a discovery many of us need to make. The ballot, perhaps, would help reconcile us to one another. But I don’t know that it has done so much for men in this particular.” She went on to say that she was in sympathy with those who wanted to vote and to be in the full current of things, but concluded: “When you come down to it, I suspect the reason I feel as I do about suffrage is a kind of instinct. It is no logic or argument. I mistrust it—do not want it.”

  In her next sentence, she indicated she thought having the vote would alter women’s role: “I feel so sure of woman’s place, so clear in my mind about her part in things. It is really worth being ‘old,’ dear Mr. Phillips, even worth being twitted in public on that fact by my younger sisters, to be so proud and so sure of anything as I am of the place and the value of women in the world—without the ballot.”14

  It was not only her younger sisters who “twitted” her. Back home in Titusville, Esther Tarbell, approaching eighty, was astounded by her daughter’s position. “Ida’s mother thought she missed the boat on suffrage,”15 recalled childhood friend Annette Grumbine. Many other women agreed with Esther. On August 26, 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to women, a suffragist told Ida: “The millennium has come. You’ll see what a world we will make.” To this Tarbell replied with some perceptivenesss: “Women will not find themselves in the political field in less than fifty years.” “You are a bad woman,”16 she was told.

  She was still a good worker. After finishing her essays on women, she abruptly returned to economics. Tarbell contributed a mild three-part analysis of the investigations made by the Pujo Committee, the House Committee on Banking and Finance. She called it “The Hunt for a Money Trust,” but possibly because of the influence of the magazine’s new management, the piece lacked verve. Tarbell diversified from economic topics to a first-person adventure story describing her trip in a “flying boat” or airplane. In a silk hood, cork jacket, and goggles, she resembled a fly in a bonnet, but she soon lost herself in the amazement of being in midair. She was thrilled to see a man in a sailboat respond when she managed a feeble wave. “I wanted to laugh and shout,” she wrote. “The sense of exhilaration is one that I have never known before. You seem to have gotten so far above all physical fears as you are above the earth, and you have a curious sense of being a part of the whole thing.”17 Euphoric, she wanted to stand up in the plane, but just then the pilot abruptly swept down and landed the plane with its pontoons in the water. When the men on the dock demanded to see if she was shaking, Tarbell proudly presented two steady hands.

  She experienced another twentieth-century phenomenon when the Authors League, which she had helped found
, asked her and a few other writers to appear in a motion picture to benefit the organization. Each writer was to choose for dramatization a favorite scene of his or her own composition. Tarbell selected a Lincoln piece. She presented herself at the Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn, annoyed with herself for having consented to such a project. It had occurred to her too late that she would be forced to see herself on the screen, a prospect that intimidated her. Someone led her into what she called the “movie factory” where men were rummaging through a disorderly mess of scenery and erecting a set. Various people, painted strangely with cosmetics, took their places and began to act before the cameras. Ida watched simultaneous scenes of college girls being frightened by a mouse and people at a card party. Discovering the efficiency with which all this was accomplished, she began to see moviemaking as a complicated business in which she must perform her small part as professionally as possible. As the director requested, she took her place at “her desk,” scribbled with great melodrama, paused, looked up at a portrait of Lincoln, pantomimed inspiration, and resumed writing furiously.

  Her feelings of foolishness as an actress were submerged in her awe at the whole process. “The only emotions I have to record,” she told a New York Times reporter, “are the haughtiness with which I went in and the meekness with which I came out.”18