The onetime group of colleagues found different ways of involving themselves with the war. Steffens went to Russia and returned home to tout its revolution; Baker wrote articles in support of the Allies that were syndicated in pro-German areas of the country; and Phillips took a job as editor of The Red Cross Magazine. Meanwhile, McClure, who had visited Germany before America entered the war and had found its people to be fitter than Allied propaganda suggested, was suspected of being a German agent.
Phillips had a small apartment in New York not far from Ida Tarbell and they met faithfully for relaxed conversations each Sunday evening. Although their correspondence indicates this standing date meant a good deal to both of them, John Phillips’s wife was untroubled. Their friendship was ardent but apparently not romantic, even though relatives and mutual friends, such as Roseboro, were aware of their devotion. Tarbell still looked to him as editor and advisor, especially in matters of her career. Her publisher was eager to have her write on natural monopolies—specifically the theory that some industries, such as oil, tend to consolidate competition rather than promote it—but Tarbell had another idea. In three years of lecture tours around the United States she had seen small towns slowly gear up for involvement in the European conflagration and she wanted to tell the story as a novel.
Phillips encouraged her and helped her shape the book. The result was The Rising of the Tide, written in less than a year for a one-thousand-dollar advance. It was her claim to the title of novelist, and one she did not stress.
Tarbell’s novel featured the love stories of two couples: the young muckraking newspaper editor who falls in love with the daughter of the town’s richest man, a girl who matures when she is caught in the German invasion of Belgium; and the idealistic young minister and the town’s “career woman,” a schoolteacher. This girl, Patsy McCullon, was a composite drawn partly from Ida’s friend from Poland days, Clara Walker, and partly from Ida herself. Left a widow and a new mother at the end of the novel, Patsy valiantly faces a life alone.
Although the book had many potentially exciting elements, including a German saboteur, The Rising of the Tide was flat. Tarbell’s characters were one-dimensional, predictable types representing various traits of public opinion. They were products of Tarbell’s mature reason and much duller than the characters she created in her fanciful Paris days.
Critics tended to be kind, but their benevolent attempts were reluctantly honest. Ida accepted her novel’s fate stoically: “It seems like one of those million things which were dropped into the vortex of the war, and like most of them, would never come to the surface.”9
Tarbell had missed the war, but her health—and assignments from Phillips’s Red Cross Magazine—permitted her to travel to Europe to see what passed for peace. In January 1919, she was sent to Paris to observe the Armistice and the Versailles Conference.
She was also determined to aid old friends from her earlier days in Paris, Madame Marillier and Charles Seignobos. Unsure of their safety and hearing stories of terrible shortages, she prepared herself to rescue them from any emergency. Into her trunk she wedged saddlebags loaded with high boots, blankets, woolen tights, and hose. Then she obtained an enormous ham with which to feed her starving friends.
Postwar traveling was as tedious as the first steps of an invalid. With all her eccentric luggage, her difficulties sometimes bordered on the absurd. When at length she landed in Bordeaux, at docks built by American Expeditionary Forces, Ida had the ham loaded onto the Paris train where it fell from an overhead rack and nearly crushed two young Quakers who were intending to help with reconstruction. Finally, when she tearfully and triumphantly presented the ham to the healthy but worn French couple, Cécile Marillier and Charles Seignobos were grateful, but also astonished by her stunt.
The France Ida encountered was damaged and weary from trying to reassemble pieces that would never fit together perfectly again. The Red Cross installed her in the Hôtel Vouillement, but at every opportunity she returned to her old Latin Quarter. The laiterie where she bought milk in her student days and several other buildings and people she had known were gone—victims of Big Berthas and German air raids against Paris. “Abri”—“shelter”—signs were still posted and many still took care to shutter their windows at night as they had when light attracted danger. Repairs had been postponed for five years—smashed windows were jagged, broken heaters still cold, and once-gay Parisians dressed in black. Tarbell, shaken by the changes, nearly broke down in tears when she saw that the meticulous Mme Marillier had allowed a bedroom door to go unhinged.
Paris in 1919 was a kaleidoscope with bits of her life reassembling in new patterns. Members of the old Seignobos circle had achieved enough recognition to be called to Paris for the conference. Charles Borgeaud was there to present the Swiss plan for the confederation of nations, and H. W. Steed was now foreign editor of The Times of London and about to be named editor. Tarbell held a reunion luncheon, but time had dulled the once-keen friendships and diffused their once-common interests.
The McClure’s/American group was more compatible. They gathered across the Seine, along the Rue de Rivoli near Red Cross headquarters where Paris had the cast of characters of Washington in wartime, complete with doughboys wanting to go home. Ray Stannard Baker, press liaison to the American delegation, William Allen White, August Jaccaci, and Lincoln Steffens were all in attendance. So was one of Ida’s old Sunday-school students from Meadville—Frederic Howe, a writer and lawyer, pretending to be a newspaperman so he could be at the conference. While many writers wangled free-lance credentials with Baker’s help, Tarbell and White roamed the town freely in their Red Cross uniforms.
Tarbell also carried, for times when a press pass would not do, a letter from Woodrow Wilson. Unbeknownst to Tarbell, he had tried to do still more on her behalf, listing her as part of the official legation. She remained ignorant of his intercessions until amazed friends told her about it soon after the conference began. She investigated and found that Secretary of State Robert Lansing, objecting to having a woman serve in the legation in any capacity, had forestalled Tarbell’s inclusion by neglecting to inform her of it. She accepted Lansing’s veto, probably because she did not want to force herself on him, by telling herself she was untrained as an internationalist, a humility which had not deterred other American officials in Paris. Just as she had once passed up the opportunity to be the first woman on a federal commission, Ida Tarbell now declined to be the first to represent her country in a diplomatic legation.10
Even if she had pressed her claim, her role would have been mostly honorary. The four Allied leaders framed the terms of the peace behind doors that they firmly closed to subordinates. Woodrow Wilson, whose country had been protected from devastation by the Atlantic Ocean, took an idealistic stance and lobbied for a League of Nations and a merciful peace. David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Orlando, heirs to a thousand years of embattled history and fifty-two months of destruction, wanted reparations, protection, and booty.
All the negotiations took place away from the sensitive ears and nimble pencils of the press. In cafés and thoroughfares, journalists were left to justify their presence. Some five hundred special correspondents had been sent to Paris at great expense and they needed to produce copy. From the outset, they protested the secret diplomacy and clamored that they, as the conduits to the common people who were to benefit from the peace, should be included in the conferences.
Tarbell’s assignment was to write about how people had come through the war, so she headed toward the industrial north of France, the region that had been most heavily damaged. She left Paris in a Red Cross car with a doughboy chauffeur as soon as roads opened. Years of continual attack had made the land a rubble of abandoned tanks, artillery shells, and hand grenades. The earth was so shattered that the lime beneath its surface had been exposed.
Ida saw nothing alive, neither cat nor dog nor hen. The only sound was that of the cold rain. She traveled to Alb
ert, Lens, Rheims, and Laon. Beyond Armentières, she attempted to enter closed Belgian territory, but her car fell into a shell hole. Twenty colonial soldiers from Annam, which was later to become part of Vietnam, carried the vehicle a quarter mile to safety while the English officer responsible for cleaning up the area berated her loudly.
Ida filled her notebook with stories of people she met along the way, such as the group of orphans being raised in the trenches. They were ignorant of social niceties like proper nose-blowing, but they judged her Red Cross uniform, with its four-in-hand tie and sensible shoes, “pas chic.” At Cambrai, she met with the directress of the hospital, whom the Germans had condemned to solitary confinement for concealing soldiers. Just freed, the woman was delighted to find that her old job had been held open for her. Especially touching to Tarbell were the peasant women at Vic-sur-Aine who came from miles around to weep as they beheld the first egg laid after the war.
In Lens, once an industrial city of twenty-three thousand inhabitants, now reduced to two hundred, Tarbell found citizens rebuilding their homes with the aid of the one available handsaw which was lent out by the hour. She soon learned to distinguish signs of habitation—a break in high-piled debris, tracks in brick dust, a shell hole stuffed with straw or tin over a shattered tile roof. The American was so shaken by what she was seeing that when she visited a woman in a hovel and found her darning socks, the simple sign of sanity transfixed her.11
Thus she was in no mood to be overawed by Jane Addams whom she found awaiting her in Paris. Addams had been touring damaged areas for the Red Cross and visiting the grave of a beloved nephew killed by the war. When Tarbell told her how disturbed she had been by the children of Lille who had lived like ferrets during the war and were now plagued by dysentery, Addams seemed indifferent and suggested she think about the German children. Tarbell retorted: “Miss Addams, I do think of them, but why not think of these children, too?”
Addams countered, “Think of the German prisoners in France!”
Tarbell grew irritated and snapped: “The German prisoners in the devastated regions are getting the same rations that the refugees are; they are getting the same rations of the English soldiers, and that is more I fear than the French and English prisoners are getting.”12
The Peace Conference had a way of exacerbating differences and strengthening bonds. At the very time when old friends were especially precious, Tarbell and William Allen White feared that August Jaccaci was dying. He lay at the Hôtel Vouillement stricken with the influenza that had killed so many in 1919. Tarbell and White took turns sitting up with him until he recovered enough to be moved, and his friend, the painter Tavanier, invited him to stay at his house in Barbizon. As Tarbell helped Jaccaci down the hall, she grew convinced that it was their final good-bye. She embraced Jaccaci with such fervor that they scandalized White and Baker.13
But Jaccaci, as usual, had a surprise in store for his old friends. He recovered fully and in a few weeks invited them all out to lunch near the forest of Fontainebleau. Tarbell, White, and Baker commandeered a Red Cross car for the occasion and had a glorious day. On the way back, they allowed the chauffeur to show off his skills. Trees and road seemed to blend in a haze of dust, and they took mischievous delight in driving from the road a limousine in which huddled a terrified American couple. As they passed the car, the trio gaily waved and discovered they had blithely terrorized no less than Thomas Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States.14
Soon after this, the conference ended. Tarbell disputed what so many professed—that the Allies had made an end to war, that this had been “the war to end all wars.” She felt strongly that the vindictive reparations demanded of Germany almost guaranteed another conflict. The night Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando approved the treaty to be presented to the Germans, she went to bed and wept.15
Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s adviser, informed Tarbell that the president wanted her to go to Geneva where the League of Nations would be headquartered, but she declined. “I thought there was enough to do at home,” she wrote in a draft of her autobiography, “but I would have given a great deal to be there as an observer.” She needed to give only her consent, but that Tarbell never gave. All her life she had wondered what woman could do and to her was presented the opportunity to demonstrate that she could be a diplomat and policy maker, but she shrank back.
The closest Tarbell came to taking advantage of these opportunities was her participation in the International Labor Conference the following October and in the inconclusive Unemployment Conference of 1922. More satisfying to her was the Washington Conference on Arms Limitation that she covered for the McClure Syndicate in 1921. The conference was originally intended to discuss naval disarmament but became an attempt to solve rivalry over the Orient. Japan had entered World War I through its alliance with Great Britain and had seized the opportunity to take over German properties in China. It was the only nation besides the United States to emerge from the Great War strengthened. The hope was that the Arms Limitation Conference could head off conflict between these two new powers.
The assembly proved to be historic. Britain, the United States, and Japan agreed to balance naval strength at a 5–5–3 ratio for fifteen years and signed a Four Power Treaty with France. All promised respect for the rights of others and fairer treatment of China, but Tarbell wrote that everything would depend on the Japanese.
She gathered her articles into a book called Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise. She took a personal approach to the state of the world and reviewers liked it, without knowing quite what to make of it. “Sane and worthwhile,” said The New Republic, “… except that she wears too conspicuously on her sleeve the broken heart of the world.” The Review of Reviews took note of her chatty style: “Some of her comments are caustic, while all are pointed and illuminating. If her account is in any degree inadequate as history, it largely makes up for such lack in vividness and intimacy as a narrative.”16
About this time a man began to pester her about her magazine career. He insisted he could do her good by acting as her literary agent. Now in his mid-fifties, a former representative of a London publishing house, Paul Reynolds had come up with the novel idea of representing authors for a commission. He approached Tarbell with the idea that she could expand her income by writing more frequently for women’s magazines. She declined to give him her phone number or any idea of her fees; as a test, she then sent him an article written by an aged and not too literary man who needed financial help. She told Reynolds to get a thousand dollars for it. Reynolds made his customary figure-eight doodles on the manuscript, then passed it along to his assistant, Harold Ober, who apparently decided the project wasn’t worth taking. He simply noted: “This is too much for me.”17
Only after Reynolds sent Tarbell a $675 check for “The New Woman Power of France,” a spin-off of her Red Cross pieces, did she take him seriously. Reynolds generated assignments, placed her work, and handled financial details so that she earned more than she expected. “You will be the salvation of my old age!” she exulted. Happily for her, the dean of literary agents had overcome her reluctance with his persistence.18
She resumed her grueling lecture schedule in 1920, setting out for a month or so around Lincoln’s birthday, a time when she was always very much in demand. The lecture tour was more rigorous than her pre-war trips. The once-impeccable Ida Tarbell traveled the country in torn stockings and droopy hemlines, an older lady obliged to raise her hems to contemporary midcalf length.
She wrote in her autobiography: “Frequently I occupied two different beds a night, and now and then three. It was a brutal, exhaustive business, but I learned to climb into an upper berth without a fuss, to sleep on a bench if there was no berth, to rejoice over a cup of hot coffee at an all-night workmen’s lunch counter, to warm my feet by walking a platform while waiting for a train. By the end of the first season I had developed a stoical acceptance of whatever came. This, I argued, saved nervous wear
and tear. I think now a certain amount of indignant protest, useless as it would have been, might have put more zest into my travel, as well as into my talking.”19
Before the war, lecture podiums had been rudimentary but the platforms of the 1920s were arranged to heighten drama and importance. It was apparent that few in the audience knew who she was. Sometimes she was introduced as the author of books on Siberia that had actually been written by George Kennan, or of stories penned by Edna Ferber, but these indignities were minor. One master of ceremonies explained why she had never married, while another called her a “notorious woman.” Sometimes she would be arranged in tableaux with begowned local ladies so that while Tarbell was speaking, the audience was pointing to the other women onstage and criticizing their dresses.
Her refuge, as ever, was Redding Ridge, Connecticut, where she would work every morning in her sun-flooded library on the unpolished mahogany desk littered with manuscript drafts and mail-order catalogs offering insect sprayers. Seed catalogs drove her to extravagant orgies of selection. She considered the relative merits of the “mammoth” versus “abundant producer” varieties. She paid close attention to bulletins from the Agricultural Department and to the Bureau of Plant Industry’s interest in how the Chilean willow and the Japanese cherry tree would acclimate to Connecticut.
Once a year she gave an old-fashioned dinner party for fifty or so local people. She learned how to use the Dutch oven in the living room and cooked a suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, and vegetables and fruits from her garden. After the meal she would take her place at the piano for a community sing.
Tarbell extolled her Czech caretaker Paul Trup as the personification of Rousseau’s Natural Man, the repository of all folk wisdom, but she defied him in two things. He wanted to modernize her stone fence by encasing it in cement, which she refused to do. He also insisted that she devote her garden to fruits and vegetables but each season it was vivid with red, yellow, and purple flowers. Peonies and roses were arranged before a low, ivy-covered wall. Poppies, descendants of those given her by J. P. Mahaffy at Chautauqua, bloomed everywhere, and the Oriental varieties had appropriated the strawberry bed and much of the ground that was intended for beets and onions.
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