IDA TARBELL_PORTRAIT OF A MUCKRAKER

by Kathleen Brady

  She was not one to deny the improvements and innovations in the world. The subjects she worked on now were uplifting. She seemed to have finished with scandal and corruption. In “The Golden Rule in Business” for The American, she featured benign business leaders and idealized men’s work as she had formerly done women’s. She thought she was striking a balance: “My conscience began to trouble me. Was it not as much my business as a reporter to present [the positive] side of the picture as to present the other?”19

  Even the radical Lincoln Steffens thought he saw a better day dawning, and was beguiled by the innovative principles of scientific management that went into production of the Model T. “Henry Ford,” he wrote, “was a prophet without words, a reformer without politics, a legislator, statesman, a radical.”20 Ford did care about his workers, but often what passed for humanitarianism was simply modernization. The coming of the electric light, which replaced the smoky torch, and studies by efficiency engineer Frederick Taylor proving that decent working conditions increased productivity encouraged more humane conditions in factories. Tarbell spent four years visiting tanneries, steel mills, and laundries around the country. Having nearly choked on cotton fibers in Rhode Island years before, she was delighted now to emerge from a twine factory without a speck of lint on her dark suit. “I never saw a machine I did not want to run,” she once commented. Thus she readily absorbed details of varied manufacturing and in her articles extolled firms where labor and management cooperated, where conditions were sanitary, and where shorter hours increased output.

  She doubtlessly believed that industrialists were policing themselves, though some steel plants were later shown not to be as enlightened as she thought. Praise of big business was not, however, the kind of work readers expected from Ida Tarbell.

  Tarbell was aware that she was not taking a popular tack. “It has taken more courage for me personally and for my magazine to try to gather up and present as a real movement the constructive work which we believe is being done in this country, and which means enormous benefit to the workers, than it ever did to carry on … a history of Standard Oil,” she wrote to John Finch, associate editor of The Survey, a magazine of social conditions. Finch was studying labor and welfare practices at the time and told her she should be harder on industry. She observed wryly that readers applauded when she described people being chopped up in machinery; but when she wrote about firms that proved this sort of tragedy unnecessary, she was accused of having sold her soul to the corporation.21

  Skeptics had an additional reason to doubt her: the Crowell interests were tightening their hold on The American. Publicly, Tarbell and her old colleagues avowed that nothing was changing, but privately they were troubled. As early as 1912, Baker was enraged over the way his Progressive-leaning stories were toned down. Ida, hoping their vision of the magazine would yet survive, implored him to be patient: “I cannot bear the idea of another break-up,” she wrote. “We shall be able to do far less if we are scattered and our work scattered. After all, it isn’t much worse than some of the interferences of SSMcC.… If they had refused to publish your article I should have walked out and I think the rest would, but the article is in.”22

  Finally, in 1915, Crowell bought out Phillips’s remaining interest in the magazine and the old staff, knowing they would now only be employees and not partners, disbanded. Siddall stayed on as the new editor with Phillips listed as consultant.

  At last Tarbell was what she had wanted to be in her Paris days twenty years before—an independent free-lance writer. But this burning desire had flickered away over the years. Her first reaction now was to realize how much she had depended on daily contact with her friends: the boisterous luncheons, the gossip, the action. She was appalled to realize she would have to pay her secretary from her own pocket, as well as carry the cost of stationery, postage, and telephones. To keep up her apartment and her Connecticut house, she wrote free-lance articles on two subjects—woman’s life and factory work.

  Because of her knowledge of industrial matters she was invited to testify before the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations that met in New York in January 1915. With mine organizers Mother Jones and John L. Brown in the audience, Tarbell urged workers and employers to cooperate in mechanizing the workplace. She was greeted with derision. Suffragist Florence J. Harriman tried to goad Tarbell into admitting she was against female suffrage but failed. All Tarbell would say was that women, not men, kept women from the vote, but she did not explain herself. Another commissioner intimated that she was an enemy of labor. She retorted that she regarded herself as a laborer and that she thought their leaders had a lot to learn but added, “It is a great mistake for the employers not to foster unions and for the unions not to understand new methods.”

  The press expressed surprise at the attempt to heckle her. “She proved repeatedly that she was more than able to hold her own against batteries of interrogatory and to give cogent reasons for every opinion she expressed,”23 said the New York Herald.

  Her status as an expert brought her an invitation from the American Federation of Labor to participate in the first Industrial Conference, held in October 1919. She did not find it a happy experience. For one thing, President Woodrow Wilson wanted the conference to set guidelines for cooperation between labor and management, but inevitably, the ongoing strikes became the focus of discussion. Second, she was in constant contact with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was so resolutely polite that after one session he hailed a cab for her. Finally, Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, repeatedly thwarted her. She and Lillian Wald tried to introduce a resolution, advocated by the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department, which would have limited woman’s work day to eight hours. It also stated that wages should be established on the basis of occupation and dependents, not sex. Gompers wanted no diversion from the specific issue of daily wages to more generalized social reform. What made Tarbell especially furious was his intervention on the issue of collective bargaining. The conference was divided into three groups representing labor, management, and the public. As a member of the last, she was in favor of the formation of individual company unions. Gompers, who had a vision of one national body to represent workers, said company unions were inadequate. This question of who could represent labor in collective bargaining shattered the Industrial Conference.

  Tarbell neither liked nor trusted the wily Gompers, a sensibility she shared with others. Yet, when a committee member wanted to submit evidence to the conference proving that Gompers had lied when he said the American Federation of Labor had never antagonized shop unions, Tarbell blocked it, insisting they deal with issues, not personalities. To Phillips she poured out her frustrations: “I am not concerned with how it puts us before the public, but what disheartens me is that when we fought so hard to get a liberal interpretation of collective bargaining; when we fought so hard to get them [labor] the right to bargain through representatives of their own choosing, that they should have been the ones to have tried to block the new spirit in industry.”24

  In Tarbell’s lifetime, factories had superseded farms, women began to work in them, and the small entrepreneur became the salaried man. The good and the bad were not easy to label, though many tried. In this new world, neither her private nor her professional life was as she expected it to be.

  PART IV

  VALOR

  Eleven

  Workhorse

  Ida Tarbell was wrong in thinking she had avoided “entangling alliances.” She had been ensnared from birth in the mesh of her family. In the late 1910s, family ties tightened and knotted her fate for the rest of her life—her brother Will suffered a mental breakdown. According to personal letters, it was soon clear to Sarah and Ida that he had unwittingly done the Tarbell fortunes as much damage as John D. Rockefeller had.

  Because the bankers of Titusville knew Will, they had allowed him to overborrow on his share of Franklin Tarbell’s estate. When his loans were due he found he was insolvent, so Ida was
forced to take charge: “I said I’d pay it but that if we could bring the property through I should keep that amount I’d paid with interest. I’d never done that before when I paid his debts. But it would be madness not to. Ten thousand dollars when you have to earn it all yourself is not a trifling sum and he would just throw it away.”1

  To help make money to clear the debt, Sarah laid aside her paint-brushes for the last time and learned bookkeeping.

  Adding to Ida’s gloom was the catastrophe of general war throughout Europe. In August 1914, she and some colleagues sat in a Hungarian restaurant on New York’s Houston Street discussing the latest news. The others’ sense of America’s isolation was strong but Tarbell murmured that before the battles ended it would be America’s war too. Wanting peace, but thinking war inexorable, she declined an invitation to join Henry Ford’s Peace Ship. Ford planned to have respected figures sail across the Atlantic with him to plead with combatants to end the fighting, but he received few acceptances from the notables he invited (though Sam McClure was one of the passengers). Few seemed to take the mission seriously, but the invitation was another cause of private debate between Ida Tarbell and Jane Addams. During a telephone conversation, Addams tried to convince Ida to go. Tarbell finally said, “If you see it, you must go, Miss Addams. I don’t see it and I can’t. It is possible [that] standing on a street corner and crying, ‘Peace, Peace’ may do good. I do not say that it will not, but I cannot see it for myself.”2

  The war continued but temporary deliverance from personal financial concerns came in late 1915 when the head of a lecture bureau asked Tarbell to embark on a forty-nine-day tour of forty-nine towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania for the munificent sum of twenty-five hundred dollars. Ida’s friends cautioned she would be wandering in the hinterlands of the United States with no more dignity than a Swiss yodeler or a spoon player, but for twenty-five hundred dollars, she was ready to do it. In a curious coincidence, these itinerant mixtures of education and entertainment were called Chautauquas.

  Determined to give people their money’s worth, Ida took voice lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and dutifully went home to do her exercises. She roamed her apartment vocalizing “Ma, me, mi, no, ba, be, bi, bo.” To strengthen her diaphragm she lay on her back, placed books on her stomach and breathed deeply until her diaphragm was strong enough to lift five books. From the time she signed her contract until she set forth in mid-June 1916, her lecture on the “Ideals of Business” filled her head and hampered her writing, but that seemed not to matter. She described herself as mired in a rut, unable to write anything but six-thousand-word articles—a book or a thousand-word squib would have been impossible. The lectures offered her the chance to earn her living and, she hoped, to contribute to people’s lives.

  Roseboro was horrified when Tarbell vowed to talk to the people in their own language. “No one ever wrote valuable stuff with that kind of aim,”3 Roseboro wrote to a friend but dared not tell Tarbell.

  Life on the road in searing summer heat was not easy physically or emotionally. Her first audience was the citizens of Niles, Ohio, a steel town not far from Poland. She stood outside the khaki circus tent blazing with lights and watched scores of men, women, and children leave their dingy unpainted houses and flock to hear her lecture. As nearby furnaces panted heavily, she mounted the podium, looked down into their work-lined faces, and tried to speak on ethics. “All my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were so serious, they listened so intently to get something; and the tragedy was that I had not more to give them.”4

  Lecturing was demanding but lucrative, and at age 59 she decided to continue it. Twice a year for five to six weeks in 1916 and 1917, she went on the road. She liked seeing the country—the people who were so eager to make more of their lives intellectually and materially—and she got a kick out of the new Model T’s puttering along the roads. Before beginning each lecture she would scan her audience to guess which ones wouldn’t believe a word she had to say, which would ask her about the single tax, and to decide which woman had the loveliest hat.

  She respected the other hardworking “talent” and admitted to disliking only one other person on her circuit—William Jennings Bryan. After the Armistice, she spoke out in favor of giving certain guarantees to France; he was against them. She was told to cut her talk. As for Bryan, “The Great Commoner,” famous for his Cross of Gold speech advocating unlimited coinage of silver, Tarbell said: “He in no way tried to influence my opinion, only to shut it off.”5

  Some nights she slept on the train as it carried her to her next city. She would awaken realizing she was on a crowded sleeper car indecently packed with dozens of people and would become nearly nauseous with the thought of it. She dealt with changes in schedules and missed connections and with being passed from the jurisdiction of one Chautauqua bureau to another. Ida had always prided herself on being superior to her physical surroundings; now she craved information about where she would lay her head. When she asked about the next town, her question was framed in terms of the hotel, its bathrooms, and whether she was to have one. On a little calendar she X-ed off each day, happy to have it over with.

  Night noises, drafts, and beds preoccupied her. At the end of the tour she found she could draw a diagram of any room in which she had slept, placing the bed exactly in relation to the windows, doors, and bathroom.

  She could have done otherwise with her life. In late 1916, after his narrow reelection, President Wilson asked her to sit on his Tariff Commission. This would have been the first such appointment of a woman. Wilson chose Tarbell, newspapers speculated, because she was a woman (and by then women were chaining themselves to the White House fence in agitation for the vote) and a Pennsylvanian. But in Wilson’s opinion she had also written more good common sense about the tariff than any man he knew. Grateful as she was for the honor, Ida declined. “I might have done it out of curiosity if I had been alone in the world, but I didn’t think a commission could be much help in making a bill,”6 she told Baker.

  Lecturing and free-lance articles—several on woman’s life and one, for Collier’s, on President Wilson—paid her money she needed to keep up her apartment, her farm, and to pay off her brother’s debts; but her neat if demanding arrangements were knocked askew first by outside events and then by her own ill health.

  As America threw itself into the Great War, President Wilson called her to Washington to work on the Women’s Defense Committee. It was composed of a dozen women, mostly suffragists, who were expected to be only window dressing for the war effort. Tarbell said in her memoirs that her own greatest achievement on the committee was to loot adjacent offices for chairs, and that the most pleasant meeting was when they discussed potential food shortages and ended up reminiscing about how their grandmothers strung apples. Tarbell also served as honorary president for the American Chocolate Fund for the U.S. Expeditionary Forces in France, and other straw-clutching, morale-boosting efforts.

  Ida had barely begun work with the Women’s Defense Committee when word came that her mother had died. She calmly phoned her maid and told her to pack, continued on as planned to a wedding, telling none of the guests what had happened, and then took the train to Titusville.7 She went calmly through the funeral and preliminary arrangements to sell her childhood home, then returned to Washington and collapsed.

  Ida was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital delirious and disastrously underweight. The expected diagnosis was overwork and stress compounded by an ulcerated tooth, but instead doctors discovered a spot on her lung. Apparently, Tarbell’s customary ability to throw herself into work after periods of rest had masked telltale symptoms. Tuberculosis is a frantic disease of deadly pallor followed by flushed cheeks, hyperactivity alternating with languor, coughing, and progressive emaciation. This wasting away once had the romantic name of “consumption,” but even before the development of streptomycin, it had a no-nonsense treatment—rest, fresh air, healthy food, and isolation from family
and stress.

  Ida remained at Johns Hopkins three months. Under supervision, she was forced to eat three meals a day, to swallow six raw eggs and five glasses of milk. She wept with frustration at being made to eat so much and sometimes she nearly choked. Only her family and closest friends knew her malady. Bert Boyden sent fresh flowers every day and arranged to have the practice continued after he went overseas. The youngest of her old associates, Boyden was now forty-two. He had been roused by the preaching of the charismatic evangelist Billy Sunday, and after the war began, he thought he could help serve the effort by going to Paris with the YMCA.

  Being in the hospital when there was war work to be done, however tangential it might be, pained Ida. She wrote to the chairman of the National Woman’s Defense Committee, Anna Shaw (her old critic on the issue of suffrage), that her hospital stay was being extended and she hinted she had had some operation: “I have been putting off the matter for several years now and I am afraid I cannot do it any longer,”8 she said. She told Shaw she had had to cancel her lectures, the reliable source of her income; but since the doctors were finally allowing her to do some dictating each day, she hoped that she might be able to help with the committee. The outcome was “Patriotic Shopping,” written for the Woman’s Home Companion, which became part of a stream of advice to the housewife on the minutiae of life in wartime.

  Once her hospital stay ended, Ida visited her own doctor, Harlow Brooks, and complained that her illness had left her with a trembling, a weak right leg and a tongue which still stiffened. She had had trouble swallowing all the food on her hospital regimen and still sometimes came close to choking. Dr. Brooks recognized the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive shaking palsy that would spread from her right side to her left and set her hands to quivering with a defiant unreachable life of their own. There was no treatment; there was no cure, so Brooks did not give her the diagnosis. He simply told her not to worry and to go about her life.